Suunto Aqua waterproof headphones review: Swimmin’ in sound

When I got back into swimming a few years ago, one of the things I immediately fell in love with was the peace and quiet. Thirty minutes with no emails, notifications, or TikTok earworms might not sound like much, but as someone who reviews tech for a living, I began looking forward to my self-imposed thrice-weekly tech break.

Then I discovered swimming headphones, and now I’m back to being bombarded by sounds for every hour of my waking life. But in this case, that’s a good thing. I’ve always found I perform better during any workout if I’m listening to music, and studies confirm this is the case for most people.

For the last six months, I’ve been using Shokz OpenSwim bone conduction headphones to blast “Pink Pony Club” into my ear holes while doing laps, so when the opportunity came to test Shokz’s first worthy opponent, the Suunto Aqua swimming headphones, you bet I jumped on it.

Easy to love, hard to control

Regardless of which brand you choose, most bone conduction headphones all kind of look the same. The only differences tend to be materials, button placement, and colourways. The Suunto Aqua headphones (which come in black or lime blue) are made of silicone and a lightweight titanium alloy, which is comfortable enough whether you’re wearing them with sunnies on a run, a helmet on a bike ride, or tucked under your swimming cap during a swim.

While the Suunto Aqua headphones don’t come with earplugs like Shokz includes with theirs (and which I strongly recommend to get the most out of your swimming headphones), Suunto has one major advantage: a power bank. Yep, the cradle that functions as the headphones’ proprietary charging connector also stores enough juice to power you through up to 20 extra hours of use on top of the 10-odd hours the headphones alone can run for.

Usually, one of the sacrifices you make when opting for bone conduction is a drop in audio quality compared to regular headphones, but the Suunto Aqua goes a long way to mitigating that decline with three sound modes: normal for light activities and quiet environments, outdoor for louder environments, and underwater for swimming. Underwater mode is the true standout - it’s by far the best quality I’ve experienced from swimming headphones. Again, don’t be expecting AirPods Pro performance, but podcasts and music are crisp and clear.

The headphones have built-in Bluetooth (which can connect to two devices at once), so you can listen to Spotify, Audible or whatever your audio app of choice is when you’re on dry land. Bluetooth doesn’t play nicely with water, however, so during swims, you’ll have to switch to offline mode. The Suunto Aqua headphones come with 32GB of storage space for audio files, making it effectively an MP3 player, which is kind of nice and nostalgic. Yes, this does mean you’ll have to hit up your long-dormant iTunes library or back catalogue of ripped CDs, but it’s easy enough to transfer music—simply connect the headphones to your laptop, then drag and drop.

Annoyingly, the headphones do come with 10 pre-installed songs. They are all pretty bad. What’s worse, though, is that you can’t delete them. The only way that I found around this was to make a separate playlist in the Suunto app with every song except those 10 and stick with that.

Speaking of the app, Suunto has made the unusual decision to bury the headphones controls in the user profile section of the app, so it takes a few taps to actually get to where you need to go.

Un-deletable songs and weird app location aside, my real gripe with the Suunto Aqua headphones is the on-device controls. There are only three buttons (one on the left and two on the right) and memorising the combinations needed to control the many features is near impossible. That said, you can customise the controls from within the Suunto app, and even control it straight from there, too. It’s only when you’re actually in the water and away from your phone that you’re stuck with the unintuitive button controls, or, if you don’t mind looking a little weird at the local pool, you can also use head movement to skip songs.

Constructive criticism

One of the aforementioned unintuitive button controls you’ll definitely want to memorise if you’re an avid swimmer like me is turning on swimming mode. I was a bit sceptical about Suunto’s swim tracking feature, but after a couple of workouts with it switched on, I’m a convert.

After each swim, simply sync your headphones with the Suunto app and you’ll get a breakdown of all the swimming metrics your smartwatch almost certainly can’t track, like breathing rate, head position, and glide time. Tapping on each metric will also show you how you compare to the recommendation for that metric. For example, I learned that while my average head angle for freestyle and breaststroke was in the optimal range, I’m over-rotating my head when breathing during freestyle, which the in-app “Suunto Coach” tells me “may lead to unnecessary energy consumption”. Neat.

Suunto Aqua - Final Thoughts

The Suunto Aqua headphones are not perfect, but that’s the nature of the beast. Designing a pair of headphones that are A) waterproof and B) sound good is no easy feat. What sets these headphones apart, however, is workout tracking. Entertainment factor aside, a pair of headphones that can track and actually make meaningful suggestions on how to improve technique and manage energy? Now that’s something else.

While I still think there’s something special about an exercise that essentially forces you to be with your own thoughts, swimming headphones make those laps so much easier and so much more enjoyable. The Suunto Aqua headphones helped reinvigorate my love of the sport, pushing me to go harder, faster, and further than before—with a little help from Chappell Roan, of course.