Shokz OpenRun Pro 2 Bone Conduction Headphones Review

The Shokz OpenRun Pro 2 carries on the same flexible silicone wraparound shape as the brand's previous headsets but with a combination of bone conduction and dynamic drivers on the inside. Rather than fitting in-ears like a conventional set of neckband earbuds, like the Beats Flex Wireless, the Shokz drivers rest in front of your ears. It comes in two sizes: Standard, which is meant for most people, and Mini, to accommodate youth and folks with smaller heads.

Our Standard-sized 'Black' model looks more like a matte charcoal with darker, black, glossy plastic accents and contrasting white logos on the sides. Other colorways include monochromatic 'Silver' and 'Orange' models. The brand also has endorsement variants like the 'Kipchoge Co-branded Edition’ named after the marathoner Eliud Kipchoge, which comes in white with a gradient of orange accents, and a 'Boston Marathon Co-branded Edition' that adds a unicorn logo on one side with a white frame and accents in a yellow-to-blue gradient.

The headset is very comfortable. It's lightweight, and because one of the properties of silicone is that it adjusts to your body temperature, you won't notice an overheated or cold headset resting on you. Because the headset leaves your ears open, there's no risk of a plugged-in-ear sensation either. Since the headset stays put by going over your ears and placing pressure in front of your ears, this could become uncomfortable, but it also depends on how much the headset stretches to fit you. Similarly, it could fit too loosely, in which case, the Mini size may suit you best.

Unlike the previous Shokz OpenRun Pro, this headset doesn't vibrate as much due to the bone conduction tech, which can bother people who are sensitive to the ‘tickling’ sensation over a prolonged period. It's worth considering whether the headband will get in the way of hats, helmets, hoods, or exercises that require laying on your back, like bench presses, and this depends on how you plan to use the headset.

The Shokz OpenRun Pro 2 has a decent control scheme with three responsive buttons. A multi-function button conveniently resides on the left side at the front of the headset, and it's slightly reshaped compared to the previous generation. Through a series of presses, this button handles the majority of audio playback, phone calls, and the Shokz voice assistant Audrey. You can see the various functions the multi-function button handles, and the main issue is that while some features are intuitive, others require memorization.

The volume buttons on the right side are found just behind your ear, and they feel different from each other, so you won’t confuse them unless you wear gloves. These volume controls also manage powering on/off and battery level announcements. The headset emits distinctive chimes for volume changes and when you’ve maxed out or minimized the volume. A voice prompt clearly announces pairing, connection status, and battery level information.

The Shokz OpenRun Pro 2 is a fairly portable headset. Its lightweight design makes it easy to carry or wear around your neck when not in use. Plus, each end of the headset is magnetic and can snap together, so if your neck is smaller, it'll be extra secure. It's convenient since it's self-contained without fiddly accessories to lose track of. But it still takes up more room than most true wireless earbuds, and you can't comfortably fit it in your jeans' pocket.

The case is excellent. It zips up to completely enclose the headset, protecting it from bumps and whatever else is floating around in your duffle bag without adding much extra weight. It also has a fabric loop if you choose to hang it from a clip or a hook. The interior snugly fits the headset, and there's a pocket with a flap for the charging cable.

The Shokz OpenRun Pro 2 is very well built. It’s IP55-rated against dust and water exposure; the manufacturer also claims the headset is sweat-resistant. Still, it's not as dust and water-tight as the IP67-rated Shokz OpenRun Bone Conduction model. 

High-quality silicone covers most of the nickel-titanium alloy internal frame. Plus, the USB-C charging port has a cover to keep out particles and moisture. Good quality plastic covers the drivers and the battery compartment. The headset seems able to withstand a couple of accidental drops, but the flexible metal frame might be a weak point if it receives excessive stress or abuse. It doesn't have a specific impact rating, though.

The Shokz OpenRun Pro 2 is amazingly stable. Intense shakes, nods, and tilts won't cause the headset to fly off of you, though it can shift and require repositioning if you're rigorous. It easily stays on during repetitive movements like jogging. If you perform more jarring exercises like box jumps, the headset can move more, but it won't come off. It's also possible that the frame can get in the way of hats or helmets and jostle into them, but it's unlikely these will dislodge the headset.

Because the headset band doesn't resize, it applies a slightly different amount of pressure to different-sized heads, but we found that the Standard size stayed put on average and larger heads. However, on people with smaller heads, the back droops, tilting the driver's location upwards, and this affects the sound, even if the headset stays on. If the back of the headset droops because it's too large, there's also the Mini size for folks with smaller heads and youths.

• Shokz OpenRun Pro2
• Reflective strips
• Warranty Card
• User Guide
• USB-A to USB-C charging cable (28cm / 11")
• Hard case

The Shokz OpenRun Pro 2 use a combination of bone conduction and dynamic drivers to playback your audio. While our testing rig isn't built to measure bone conduction, it can still capture an impression of the frequency response, and we feel that the raw graph, in particular, lends a reasonable representation of how the headset sounds. That said, unlike the vast majority of other headphones we've reviewed, these results aren't as definitive as measurements of in-ears and over-ears that are fully compatible with our Brüel & Kjær HATS Type 5128-B.

As with most open-fits, the frequency response won't match conventional over-ears or in-ears when it comes to reproducing a full sound because it's an inherent limitation of the design as a trade-off for environmental awareness. Even so, when set to the default EQ, the headset plays back a fairly even and clear mid-range with a little bit of high-bass boom that rolls off severely without the punch and thump of lower bass frequencies. The treble range is rather muted, lacking definition and detail on bright harmonics from cymbal hits and sibilants on soaring vocals.

In essence, this tuning is very mid-range focused and somewhat harsh, which makes it a good choice for podcasts and audiobooks. While you'll still register the weak boom of a kick drum, it lacks depth and body, and the sparkle is missing from the top end. Importantly, how it sounds ultimately depends on how loud noises in your environment are because ambient sounds will mask different frequencies.

You can also choose from several EQ modes within the app to tailor the sound.

The Shokz OpenRun Pro 2 has decent frequency response consistency. The chart can look a bit worse than the reality of actually wearing the headset because it scarcely reproduces much bass or high frequencies above the low-treble region, where the majority of the variation is in the measurements.

In real-world use, the mids sound virtually the same between wears, though you'll still want to pay attention to placement, as their design leaves more room for error than in-ears, for example. Glasses can also pose an issue if they have thick arms. Also, on different people, the headset can sit in slightly different locations, which drastically alters your perception of output volume. It’s available in two sizes to reduce fit issues.

As expected for this type of open-fit headset, the bass range rolls off severely. Bass guitar and kick drums in tracks like Cousin Dupree by Steely Dan lack depth and punch. You can still make out the bass punctuating the beat of the track, but it sounds quite weak.

The Shokz OpenRun Pro 2 has a very clear mid-range. Speech comes through well, and lead instruments like saxophones and guitars are played back reasonably evenly. Although the mids adhere well to our target curve, leads sound harsh due to the boost in the mid and high-mids without enough bass to balance out the emphasis. A roll-off in the low-mids can somewhat rob bass guitars of their upper harmonics, which sound a bit hollow.

The Shokz OpenRun Pro 2 doesn't output a bright or detailed treble response. Although it scores a zero in this test as the response is well below our target, the result is due to our rig's limited compatibility with bone conduction technology. That said, subjectively, it's still not a trebly headset. In use, we found that bright harmonics that contribute to detailed and clear vocals and cymbals are markedly diminished but not completely absent.

The headset's peaks and dips performance is middling. This is due to the frequency response having severe roll-offs in both the bass and treble regions as a limitation of the open-fit design, leading to a dramatic-looking graph. Since the headset mainly reproduces mids, it controls its own sound profile well, given how flat that range is. The mid-range sounds harsh due to the absence of much treble, despite the peak in the high-treble, which isn't noticeable for most people. Still, keep in mind that our testing rig has some limitations regarding compatibility with the headset's hybrid bone conduction drivers, so your experience may differ.

The Shokz OpenRun Pro 2’s hybrid bone conduction and dynamic driver design isn't fully compatible with our testing rig. As a result, the weighted phase mismatch measured, for example, isn't perceivable with real-world content, and it's likely an artifact of testing a headset that vibrates on an incompatible test head. Similarly, the weighted frequency mismatch isn't audible either. On the other hand, there is group delay present, and the bass sounds loose, but because the headset lacks low-end overall anyway, it's not noticeable in real-world circumstances when listening to music. These results align with other products by the manufacturer we've measured, suggesting a similar performance and ergonomics.

The Shokz OpenRun Pro 2 has an exceptionally open sound like the Shokz OpenRun Bone Conduction, though it's difficult to capture other measurements due to the drivers sitting in front of your ears towards your cheekbones. In any case, the pinna-related transfer function (PRTF) results are one factor associated with the perception of a passive soundstage. This headset's soundstage can seem a bit unnatural, with some frequencies sounding more like they're coming inside of your head, while other frequencies may seem as if they're playing from speakers around you.

Largely due to the test head incompatibility, the weighted harmonic distortion appears especially elevated with the headset. This is partly due to the vibrating transducers and dynamic drivers being positioned so far from the in-ear microphones used on our rig, requiring the headset volume to be increased to levels far outside typical listening levels to reach our standardized targets of 90 dB/SPL and 100 dB/SPL. We were only able to get up to 85 dB/SPL measured on our rig and compensated with an artificial boost in both the graph and measurements to show our results. In reality, this headset at max volume gets fairly loud (but noisy environments like a stadium crowd can still drown out your audio), and you can expect less harmonic distortion than the graph suggests.

That said, the results aren't directly comparable to conventional headphones because bone conduction drivers aren't fully compatibility with our test head.

These are the settings used to test this headset. Our results are only valid when using it in this configuration.

As expected, the Shokz OpenRun Pro 2 has terrible full range noise isolation. Open-fit designs such as this one leave your ear canals open to hear your surroundings for maximum situational awareness, which is great for running outdoors or working in collaborative office spaces. This absence of noise isolation isn’t ideal for commuting, though, as it blocks nothing out, leaving your audio content to compete with background sounds.

In common scenarios, the open-fit headset doesn’t isolate you from your environment (which is expected), so you can easily monitor your surroundings. That said, it works better for some uses than others. If you go for late night walks, this design allows you to stay aware, but if you also want to focus in silence at the gym, the open-fit lacks that versatility.

The Shokz OpenRun Pro 2 has mediocre leakage performance. Depending on the volume level, a bright and mid-rangey representation of your audio may be audible in shared spaces. If you’re running past somebody, though, they would need to be quite close to catch much of anything at all.

The Shokz OpenRun Pro 2's microphone system's recording quality is not bad. Voices sound intelligible with enough lower mids to sound full. Depending on the pitch of your voice, though, the uneven frequency response of the mic can cause a congested tone or introduce a very slight lisp. Because the headset uses an AI noise reduction algorithm (which is always enabled), you can hear the tone change throughout the demo recording as the algorithm attempts to correct noise that isn't present.

The microphone’s noise handling is great. The AI noise reduction algorithm effectively separates your voice from background sounds. Besides overpoweringly loud noises like trains, which can creep in somewhat, the headset mic system cuts out other people’s voices rather well and prioritizes your speech.

The Shokz OpenRun Pro 2 has an alright battery life. It's advertised to reach 12 hours of audio playback time on a single charge. We measured nine hours of battery life, but we expect that in everyday life, you'll get a longer battery life than this. Because we standardized loudness levels based on the microphones in our testing rig, we had to increase the headset to max out the volume to reach 85 dB/SPL. With that said, the microphones used to measure the output level are only in the ear canals of the test rig; max volume is experienced as louder than 85 dB/SPL when you wear the headset.

Unlike the previous Shokz headsets, this one scraps the proprietary charger for a standard USB-C connection, which is a universal choice; you don't need to be as vigilant about where you store the cable. The headset also quickly charges in five minutes for an extra 2.5 hours of battery life, according to the manufacturer, and when left idle, it'll enter a standby mode to conserve battery life.

The Shokz app is good; check out the video tour. It covers the majority of your needs on the home screen, including EQ presets and a five-band equalizer with which you can save your own custom settings. There's also a 'Classic' EQ preset, which is a bone conduction-only mode that disables the dynamic drivers, so the headset vibrates more like previous Shokz models during audio playback.

With the app, you can control multi-device pairing, change the language and the volume of voice prompts, control playback in other apps, and update the firmware. Otherwise, it's fairly simple because you can't remap controls, change Bluetooth codecs, or access spatial audio.

It includes a 28 cm (11-inch) USB-A to USB-C cable to charge the Bluetooth-only headset with no wired connectivity. This USB-C compatibility seems like a convenient update to the Shokz OpenRun Pro2 compared to previous models like the Shokz OpenRun Pro Bone Conduction, which use proprietary charging cables instead.

The Shokz OpenRun Pro 2 demonstrates very good Bluetooth connectivity. It's capable of multi-pairing with up to two devices, meaning you can easily switch between your laptop and smartphone, which is nice considering there's no quick pair feature. The headset supports a greater connection range than the Shokz OpenRun Bone Conduction, making it possible to leave your phone in your gym locker, assuming it's not that far from the workout area. While latency varies with different devices and some apps can compensate, you may notice A/V sync issues because the headset's latency measured is high enough that videos can exhibit lipsync mismatch. Unfortunately, the app lacks a low-latency mode too.

You can only connect the headset to your PC via Bluetooth. Once wirelessly connected, you get full audio and microphone support.