I love swimming but it is hard to swim for more than 30 mins, not because I get tired but because it gets boring.
I had been looking for headphones for swimming but almost all of them are essentially mp3 players. That is because Bluetooth doesn’t pass through water very well. You need to pre-load songs or mp3s. Which would be fine if you only care for music. But I am mostly listening to news or audiobooks. It seems like too much work to use those headphones for anything but music.
Except for Zygo. It lets you listen to anything directly from your phone underwater.
Zygo gets around the limitation of Bluetooth by placing a transmitter between the phone and headphones. The transmitter connects to the phone via Bluetooth and converts audio to radio waves, which are able to travel through water better.
Here is my experience with it so far:
Ordering process was a bit weird. After I placed the order, there was silence for a really long time, though there was a 4th of July weekend in between, so that may have caused some delays. Finally, I emailed support, who said it was already shipped but I never received a shipping email. It was shipped via DoorDash, which is another interesting thing. I didn’t know DoorDash was entering package shipments.
One thing to watch out for is that there are two volumes to control. Volume on phone or transmitter and volume on headset. When I first tried it, volume on headset was high and phone volume was low. This results in really loud static crackling in headphones. Lowering headphone volume and increasing volume on phone makes sound much clearer.
As for sound quality, it is decent for music. As I will be using it mostly for books, news, podcasts, I don’t care much about perfect sound. I tried while swimming, it sounds very boom-y and bass-y. It was hard to understand some people especially those with deep voices, but it was tolerable.
It is hard to decide right now whether to keep this or swim in silence. I will try with ear plugs next time.
My pool is only 10 yards, so I had no problem with range issues. Also, I could hear sounds 5 feet below at the bottom of the pool. It is really unbelievable experience to listen to music underwater.
Also before ordering, I researched company quite a bit as $300 is a lot of money for headphones. It seemed that they had updated their hardware as they mentioned here:
So I was expecting to receive a headset which was newer and upgradeable. But my headset is older model and not upgradeable. That was really disappointing.
But they are a startup and I like to support them. Hopefully, they’ll stand behind their hardware if older models have any issues.