Pineapple Rumble KW Earbuds and Bone Conduction Technology
Having recently taken up podcasts, I’ve been coming to the realization that San Francisco is loud. I turn up my iPhone when in the subway, when on the street, sometimes I have to cover my ears through construction or a particularly loud and squeaky section of the BART. And after listening to music and podcasts for a while, I realize too that sometimes my ears just need a break.
And that, surprisingly, is my mind kicking in and trying to protect my ears from hearing loss. Simple day-to-day noise levels can cause harm over the long-term, especially when, like me, you’re adding noise to noise. My iPhone can go up to probably 115 decibels (91 decibels is safe for about 2 hours), and though I never put it quite up there, it’s still made me quite interested in these new headphones, the Pineapple Rumble KW earbuds.
The Pineapple Rumble KW earbuds are designed to use both air conduction (soundwaves traveling through air) and bone conduction (sound waves traveling through bone). We use bone conduction on a day-to-day basis; it’s why our voice sounds different to us when we hear a recorded version of it, because we often hear our own voice primarily through bone conduction. Since bone conduction is very good at picking up lower frequencies, our voices sound lower to us than the people hearing us.
Using bone conduction for earbuds has been done for quite some time — in hearing aids. These new Pineapple Rumble KW earbuds advertise that through bone conduction, you are able to lower the volume and therefore preserve your ears. Perhaps there are other reasons bone conduction is supposed to be superior, but the physics of that are beyond me.
However, since bone conduction only transmits lower frequencies, these earbuds still need to use air conduction for treble (mid to high range frequencies). In this way, they hope to prevent hearing loss that is derived from too much pressure on the eardrum through air conduction.
I thought the bone conduction technology worked quite well, though it tickled just a bit and took a small amount of getting used to. One of our other reviewers felt that there was a disconnect between the treble and bass volumes, which isn’t very easily correctable unless your mp3 player allows you to adjust those volumes individually, though I felt no such noticeable tickling sensation.
The buds come in multiple sizes to better fit in your ear. For some reason, none of them quite seemed to stay in for me, but again, other people did not record the same problem. I have had this problem before with similar earbud designs, so it may just be specific to my ear size and shape.
Another cool feature of these buds is that they are waterproof. They have no earholes so you can take them under water, wear them in the rain, or shower with them.
However, the best part of these headphones, is that I could indeed put my iPhone to a (ever so) slightly lower volume in the loud streets of San Francisco and still hear quite well. I found them less enjoyable for listening to music, but for podcasts they were great.
Prices vary widely on this product and can go up to $200. We found it on Amazon for $80, which makes them a much higher-value buy.
