Earbuds That Don't Go in Your Ears

Earbuds can sound great, but they have two major drawbacks: They sit inside your ears where they can cause discomfort and they block out ambient noise which can be distracting, or even hazardous in certain situations. If you want earbuds that don’t go in your ears, our picks below offer good noise cancellation and a secure fit without the bulk of in-ear headphones.

Our top picks are designed to keep in place despite your most vigorous workouts. While they’re not as secure as earbuds that screw into your ears, these buds are still easy to wear for long periods of time. They have a variety of stabilizing features including ear hooks and sports fins (also known as wingtips). These are useful because the shape of your ears change throughout the day and they can affect how well your earbuds stay in place. Earbuds are also susceptible to movement from your jaw and the temporomandibular joint that connects your skull to your jaw. Those movements can jostle them loose and cause them to fall out. Some earbuds also lose their snugness over time due to wear and tear or sweat. We’ve included options that are designed to withstand the roughest use and come with replacement ear tips for customizing the fit.

The KEF XS2’s standout feature is their incredible sound quality, which makes music and podcasts sound as if they’re playing inside your head. This is because they have dual drivers – a dynamic driver for high frequencies and a balanced armature driver for low frequencies. They also deliver a surprisingly spacious soundstage, which helps make songs and spoken words feel more alive and real.

They’re a bit more expensive than some of the other buds on this list, but they are well worth it for audio lovers who value superbly refined sound quality. They’re also one of the only earbuds to support high-quality Bluetooth codecs like aptX HD and LDAC, which offer lower latency and a more detailed listening experience than standard SBC.

These earbuds are designed to look more like headphones than any of the others on this list. They have a unique design that slings around your ears rather than resting in them, with a silicone flex arm that wraps around and attaches to the ear. They have a long press to switch between ‘aware’ mode, which lets in ambient sounds so you can hear what’s going on around you, and various ‘commute’, ‘focus’, ‘home’, ‘workout’ and ‘running’ modes for adjusting the noise cancelling to match your activity.

Bose knows noise cancellation better than anyone, and the ANC on these earbuds is superb. Every time you pull the buds out of their case, they let out a tone that surveys your environment to create an acoustic model of your ears. It’s this technology that makes the QuietComfort Ultra buds so effective at cutting out external noise on a flight or train and would be perfect for blocking out the world in a noisy office.