Sharp HP-BC55 Bone Conduction Headphones: IP68 Rated, 32 GB MP3 Player Built In. Train Without Your Phone

The Sharp HP-BC55 is a pair of headphones that don’t go in your ear. A bone conduction transducer sits on the cheekbone just in front of the ear and sends sound through bone instead of air, so the ear canal stays open and you still hear the car behind you, the coach on the pool deck, or the kid in the next room. The frame weighs 45.4 g (0.1 lb), covers 20 Hz to 20 kHz, and connects over Bluetooth 5.3. A microphone is built in, and the buttons on the frame handle answer, reject and end, plus volume, previous track and next track.

It also carries your music. Sharp builds 32 GB of memory into the headset with MP3 playback, which is the part that changes how you use it: the phone can stay in the car. At an ordinary bit rate that is somewhere around seven thousand tracks, more than anyone is going to load. Almost nothing else in this price range does it, and the pair that do are usually swim-only players with no Bluetooth at all. This one goes both ways.

The chassis is rated IP68, the top of the ingress scale, which means dust tight and rated for immersion rather than splashes. Charging is USB Type-C at 5 V, and an LED on the frame tells you where the battery stands.

Battery is 6 hours of playback, about 7 hours on standby, and about 1.5 hours to bring it back over USB-C. Six hours covers a long ride, a full shift on a job site, or a week of ordinary training sessions before you think about the cable again. Expect less on a cold morning, the way any lithium cell behaves.

 The phone stays home

Load MP3 files onto the 32 GB of built-in memory over the USB-C cable and go. No signal, no notifications, no armband, nothing to drop on the pavement or leave on a bench. When you do want the phone back, Bluetooth 5.3 pairs it in and the built-in microphone takes the call. The switch costs you nothing: you are not choosing between a music player and a headset, you own both.