Playing your favourite tunes when you hit the water, the Suunto Aqua waterproof headphones keep you entertained while keeping track of your swim.
Traditional headphones and earbuds are great for listening to music on the move, but they tend to block out the world around you – which can be dangerous in some situations.
A few earbuds like Apple’s AirPods Pro, Google’s Pixel Buds Pro and Samsung’s Galaxy Buds 3 Pro offer the option of Transparency mode, to let in the outside world and improve your situational awareness while listening to music.
An alternative often favoured by athletes are “bone conduction” headphones, which bypass your eardrums and instead send vibrations through your skull directly to your inner ears.
With bone conduction there’s a drop in sound quality compared to traditional headphones, but in return your ears are completely free to hear important sounds like traffic.
The Suunto Aqua bone conduction headphones go one step further with a completely waterproof design, which ensures you can keep listening to your favourite music when you get off the road and into the water.
Table of contents
Suunto Aqua first impressions
The Suunto Aqua waterproof headphones stick with the typical open-ear bone conduction design, similar to rivals like Shokz and H2O.
A thin flexible band runs around the back of your neck, with large loops on either end which sit around the top of your ears. At the end of each loop is a large transducer bud, instead of an earbud. The transducer buds sit flat on the top of your jaw, just in front of your ears.
With the band around the back of your head, it’s nicely out of the way if you’re wearing a swimming cap or cycling helmet. Thankfully, the headphones also don’t interfere with wearing glasses.
With the headphones in place on your head, you’ve got access to a few buttons for controlling audio playback, along with handling phone calls and talking to your smart assistant.
The large multi-function button on the left bud is easy to reach, but the small forward [○ ▷] and back [◁] buttons behind your right ear would benefit from being larger and easier to tell apart by feel. It’s also confusing at first because the forward [○ ▷] button looks like it’s two buttons.
Surprisingly, Suunto doesn’t include a manual in the box to explain the built-in controls and complex button combos required to access different features. Thankfully, I found the manual online. To be fair, the Shokz headphones offer an identical button configuration, but thankfully come with a great paper user guide in the box.
Dive into the Suunto app and you can customise the buttons if you’re not happy with the defaults. To help you keep track of what the Suunto Aqua headphones are doing, sometimes they beep to confirm their connection status. Other times, they actually talk to you to tell you which mode you’ve engaged.
Once you’ve mastered the headphones’ built-in controls, you can access your smartphone, play music and take calls when you’re connected via Bluetooth. You even have the benefit of multi-point for quickly switching between two Bluetooth devices.
Serious music fans might be disappointed that Bluetooth only supports the standard SBC codec and not AAC.
Of course, Bluetooth cuts out as soon as your head goes under the water. Thankfully, there’s the option to drag and drop music files onto the headphones’ 32 GB of internal storage. It supports the MP3, FLAC, WAV and AAC formats, so you can listen to music uninterrupted while you’re in the water.
One challenge for many people these days is that they rely on streaming services and probably don’t have any music files at hand. If you don’t have CDs to rip, you can buy music files from a few services like iTunes.
Charging the headphones’ built-in battery and copying across music requires fitting the supplied custom connector – which clamps onto the right arm. The connector also features a USB-C port for power and/or connecting to your computer as USB storage (with a tiny USB-C cable included in the box).
Annoyingly, the headphones have 10 built-in music tracks which you can’t delete. You can drop more files into the music folder and create your own playlists using the app, but frustratingly the music player can’t see subfolders so it’s difficult to organise your onboard music.
As an added bonus, that connector also doubles as a power bank, holding enough juice to recharge the headphones twice.
This is certainly handy to ensure you can quickly recharge away from home, but the downside is that you’re in real trouble if you lose this customer connector – which would be part of the reason Suunto supplies a soft carry case.
One design surprise is that the headphones don’t float. To be fair, they are unlikely to become dislodged from your head but, considering they don’t float, I would have opted for a much brighter colour scheme to make them easier to see on the bottom of the pool.
Suunto Aqua specifications and price
| Speaker | Impedance 9Ω±15% Frequency range 20Hz～20kHz Sensitivity 120dB@1kHz -1.5VdBFS T.H.D <3% 200Hz-10kHz |
| Microphone | Sensitivity -38dB(1kHz) Frequency range 100Hz~10KHz S/N Ratio 62.5dB |
| Onboard storage | 32 GB |
| Onboard audio formats | MP3, FLAC, WAV, AAC |
| Charging | Detachable powerbank and USB-C cable |
| Battery | 10 hours Bluetooth playback, 6 hours offline playback Two full recharges from the powerbank |
| Bluetooth | Bluetooth 5.3 A2DP, AVRCP, HFP, HSP SBC codec |
| Ruggedness | IP68 waterproof to 5 metres for 2 hours |
| Dimensions | 95 x 128 x 47 mm |
| Weight | 35 gm |
| Colours | Lime Blue, Black |
| Price | $299.99 RRP |
| Warranty | 1 year |
| Official website | Suunto Australia |
Features
For some people, the ability to listen to music underwater would be a big enough selling point. On top of this, the Suunto Aqua waterproof headphones feature motion detection to assist with performance tracking if you’re looking to improve your swimming technique.
When it comes to tracking exercise, the headphones only support swimming, but they go into plenty of detail – right down to stroke posture, head pitch angle, breath frequency and glide time
If you want to track any other activity, like running or cycling, Suunto expects that you’d also be wearing something like a Suunto watch.
The Suunto Aqua headphones do let cyclists take advantage of neck fatigue alerts while riding. The headphones can also perform a neck mobility assessment of cervical spine flexibility – first seven vertebrae in the neck – and a jump assessment of neuromuscular fatigue.
Finally, like many headphones, you can also use the motion tracking to control music and phone calls hands-free – which is handy whether you’re on the run, ride or swim leg of your workout.
Quality
Put to the test, the Suunto Aqua waterproof headphones make it easy to listen to your favourite tracks, so you can stay in the zone while swimming. They’re very comfortable to wear for extended periods and firmly stay put, whether you’re on the road or in the pool.
If your head goes underwater for just a second, Bluetooth playback from your phone cuts out as expected, but quickly resumes when you resurface. If you’re under for a few seconds, the music doesn’t resume until you press the button next to your left ear after you resurface.
Even if you’re just swimming laps in the pool with your head mostly above water, you’ll find that Bluetooth regularly cuts out for a split-second, which quickly becomes annoying. Onboard music ensures uninterrupted listening, it’s just a shame that the Suunto app doesn’t offer more detailed library management of the music files stored on the headphones.
As with most bone conduction headphones, you need to shift buds around slightly to find the sweet spot. Once you do, you get reasonably full-bodied sound whilst still hearing the world around you. Not surprisingly, it doesn’t match the sound quality of decent earbuds or over-ear headphones.
That said, the Suunto Aqua actually sound much better underwater than they do above the surface, even if you don’t bother to change the sound mode to Underwater.
When you’re out of the water, you’ve got the choice of Normal mode for day-to-day tasks or Outdoor which makes your music easier to hear in noisy environments like cycling or road running.
Compared to the similarly priced $269 Shokz OpenRun Pro bone conduction headphones, the Suunto Aqua sound a bit hollow and underwhelming in Normal sound mode. Switching them to Outdoor mode is a big improvement, delivering full-bodied sound that leaves the Shokz OpenRun Pro sounding a tad bass heavy in comparison.
It’s worth mentioning that Shokz also offers the waterproof $299 Shokz OpenSwim Pro with onboard music storage, although I didn’t have a pair at hand for a direct comparison.
Who are the Suunto Aqua waterproof headphones for?
If your exercise regime includes spending plenty of time in the water, then the Suunto Aqua waterproof headphones might be a great fit. Especially if you’d also benefit from the situational awareness afforded by bone conduction during other potentially dangerous activities like running and cycling on the road.
If you’re struggling to choose between rivals, the Suunto Aqua’s powerbank connector might be the big selling point, allowing for you to recharge on the go.
Keep in mind that you’re paying a premium for the waterproof design and there are cheaper splash/sweat-proof alternatives from Suunto and others if you’re not actually getting in the water.
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