You gotta love it when a company scoops itself. Shokz — the maker of some excellent bone-conduction headphones like the OpenRun Pro, the OpenFit and OpenFit Air, as well as the latest water-centric OpenSwim Pro — is teasing a new set of headphones coming August 28. A video teaser pretty clearly shows something in the OpenRun Pro sort of category.
The teaser on the Shokz website also comes with a link to enter to win whatever it is Shokz is set to announce. Click it, and you can clearly see a box for the Shokz OpenRun Pro 2 with a tagline that reads “redefining the sound of sports.”
We can’t yet say for certain exactly what’s in the new kit, but the basic design looks to be the same as the original OpenRun Pro (which themselves were basically a minor update to the old Aeropex, from when the company was known as Aftershokz). This sort of headphones works by using the bones in your skull as the mechanism to get sound to your ears, instead of using a more traditional speaker that moves air. And it’s always worked surprisingly well, even if the audio quality isn’t nearly the same as what you’d get from traditional earbuds or headphones.
Why use bone conduction, then? Because it leaves your ears unblocked, allowing you to hear everything that’s going on around you. That’s key for folks who are exercising on the streets, like runners and cyclists. And that’s also the sort of use case in which you don’t need (or expect) pristine audio quality.
In any event, there’s not much more info to glean from the teaser. The giveaway says it’s a $250 gift box, including “new Shokz flagship headphones,” a cap, and a fanny pack (erm, “waist bag,” they’re calling it). Shokz is giving away 10 of these gift packs.
And for everything else, we’ll just have to wait until August 28.
Instagram is making its way to yet another screen, and this time, Apple TV is getting a taste of the Reels rabbit hole. The company has launched a dedicated Instagram app for Apple TV, bringing Reels, longer videos, and live shows to the big screen. So, if watching one quick clip on a phone somehow turns into an hour of scrolling, there's now a much larger screen for that.
Instagram brings Reels and more to Apple TV
Audio-Technica, a brand well known for making some of the best studio and professional headphones on the market, has just come out with the ATH-AWX7000, which the company itself claims to be its "finest headphones ever." The new flagship closed-back headphone has debuted at an eye-watering price of $3,799. It combines hand-finished Japanese woodwork with a newly developed 58mm driver.
The earcups are made from Kiso cypress, a prized wood historically used for Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples. Each housing is finished by hand with traditional Echizen lacquer, which brings out the grain and is expected to darken over time. The frame and sliders are finished in a deep navy kachi-iro shade traditionally associated with samurai.
This post is brought to you in paid partnership with Best Buy.
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