Bonephones: bone conduction headsets anyone? - Page 2

I'm really curious to see how you'd graph frequency response from those. Seems like they'd sound different to everyone as bone density can vary person to person.

Ah, the perennial bone conduction headphone thread. Head-fi works in cycles.

I was looking into these and it appears that they spent some money to refine this technology and they feel that they will appeal to hearing impaired and audiophiles that was to listen at loud concert levels without a chance of any hearing damage. If that is true I would by a set just for Joe Satriani Super Colossal. How about Queen We will rock you. This could be a real cool toy if the sound makes a educated listener go white in the mouth. I just bought the sony pfr v1 and love them in my car because they don't cover my ears, and sound more live than most other headphones. These rest on your temples so they would be legal to drive with. That is a WOW factor.

Not electrostatic, dynamic or othro but... the trouble is that often it really is just a moving-coil driver in a sealed housing.

The true bonephone would use magnetrostriction drivers, like the drive elements employed in NXT speakers or the Olympia soundbug with its Feonic transducer, this would be a physically coupled driver to the side of the head. The problem with direct magnetostriction is that sound energy loses a huge amount of energy when it makes a transistion from one kind of material to another (thus the reason why double or triple glazed windows have far better sound isolation than normal glass. The common misconception being that there is a vaccuum between the glass sheets and that sound does not travel in a vaccuum, this is untrue, typically the double glazed unit is filled with a noble gas, usually Argon IIRC. The use of a dynamic driver for a bonephone type of headphone only compounds this problem as the original sound is being generated within a sealed air chamber, adding one more layer of sound/material transiition to the reproduction path, but I digress...)

Because the head is made up of a plethora of different materials at different levels and densities and of complex and dynamic composiiton, sound transferred to the inner ear via transmission through the structure of the skull is going to suffer far greater difficulties in its path than does the sound reproduced by a transducer outside of the ear moving the air in front of the outer ear.

The bonephone is by its very nature highly limited in its potential fidelity and I think that the best way that the technology would be employed for headphones would be some kind of miniturised NXT panel. But then you wouldnt have the privacy offered by the driectly coupled driver.

review:

I already have bone conduction headphones. The 'AudioBone' from Golden Dance and the EZ-80P/S20 From Vonia.
However, the Filltune phones are truly amazing. The usual loss in bone conduction phones is the treble range. As the frequency response for Filltune is from 25Hz to 25kHz compared with 50Hz – 4kHz for the others, the treble response is sometimes too much, so the treble needs to be taken down a little. I love them. However they do come at a price. $500, and if you live in the UK a further 'hike' of $110 import dity! Are they worth it? Well, as I can only hear by bone conduction they are the business.

Bump. Anyone has heard (or boned )  the Teac Filltune HP100 or HP200?

I too am interested.

The bonephone is mostly used by audiologists to test bone conduction. Not sure if it's such a good idea to bypass the outer ear completely...

 

Perhaps a MD or a phD here could write a paper on it? Heh.

Think of Quit Riot's cover of Teenage Lust and 'Cum Feel the Noise.'  Hard rocking, since an era where concerts were so loud.  sound levels began to articulate your control of breathing functions.  If understand rock, from Jimi Hendrix sound levels. Discussion about the bone hone and air space in the head is all wrong.  No, a multi-connevction that transduces vibrations to your bones and muscles, plus very high-end earphone reproduction for midrange and etherial sounds. 

   Construct that, and it is irrelevant for, "not bothering others.'  Because in such a system that was not possible before technologic advances in sound reproduction, this is the dream system.  Enveloped an immersed in a total sound , a dynamic environment.