Hi Everybody,

I am a new biker and photographer by trade. I am looking for feedback to a question about wearing ear buds while biking. ( Please forgive the maybe wrong location of post, blogs are confusing to me.)

I find that when I use ear buds while biking, the electric cable hanging from the buds creates a sort of "Harmonic" (like a guitar string) and I hear the wind passing the cable as I move forward quickly. Also, I only wear buds while on a bike path devoid of cars.

I wind up turning up the volume to drown out the noise. Can anybody else who has the same issue please reply as I need some feed back to see if it is a universall problem, or am I a sort of freak with particularly acute hearing at the low range of sound?

All responses are very helpful and appreciated, if needed I will repost this in an appropriate location on the forums, where ever that is.

Gratefully: Eric Curry

Hi, and welcome. I normally wear buds while biking, but at a very low volume. I run the wire inside of my jersey and out the bottom to my stem mounted Ipod touch. Have'nt had the issue you have, but maybe give it a try?

Welcome to BF!

Thanks for the reply and the welcome, it is great to feel welcomed. That is a good piece of advice, but I think the harmonic noise comes from the wind passing the last 8" of the cable just before the bud in my ear, not so much the entire cable that hangs below my head and dangels over my chest etc. I'll try it though, test it and play around wiht your technique.

Generally, I find that the noise of the turbulent wind passing over my helmet straps and ears is the loudest part of riding, earbuds or not. If this harmonic noise is occurring, I simply cannot hear it over the sound of the wind.

I did nto suspect it is also the straps of my helmut that are making so much noise. I'll have to test that also, ( remove the helmut to hear the difference) probably can't remove my ears though. Thanks

I just wouldn't ever wear ear buds while biking, even in car-free areas. I ride in NYC so getting rid of ear buds was an early decision for me as you can imagine. Now if I'm on a long/long-ish trip I have my Xmini capsule II speaker and mp3 player in a cheap top tube bag (roswheel, a fake chinese company) and that way the music comes right at me without distracting me.

I know exactly what you mean by that "guitar string" sound, and I personally go insane from it. I had the same thing when jogging or running on the treadmill. You also have to worry about the buds getting yanked out of your ears and flagellating around and getting stuck in you spokes, very unsafe.

Lastly, I read a study a while back that wearing ear buds while doing exercise is just flat out horrible for your ears because when you do exercises like running or cycling, there is less blood in your ears because the body moves it to your legs so your ears get even more vulnerable to permanent damage.

These reasons are why my volume is just high enough to hear the music, yet low enough to hear everything around me, and why I run the wire thru my jersey.

hey bike0... thanks for the feeed back, I was not aware that buds are bad in general for your health (hearing), I am glad though that somebody else also hears that noise and I am not totally a feak- misery loves company. In Los Angeles, almost everybody on the bike path at the beach who is skating or biking or joging has buds so I would like to figure out a great solution for it, glad that at least it is a "real thing"

Distraction in traffic - OK. Problems with wires - yeah. Hearing loss if listening with volume cranked all the way up to 11 - definitely.

But this... Do you have any links to this study?

--J

here you are, https://headwize.com/?page_id=266

Thanks. All I can find are references to the study, it seems the study itself is not available anywhere online.

I'm not going to get into the whole issue of ear buds while riding but the wind noise is due to microphonic properties of the cable itself.
One suggestion is to loop the cable over your ear and then behind instead of letting the cable just hang down, and then pass it under your jersey.
The other option is better cable but I suspect that on a bike none of us are using high end ear buds and cable...

Marty