Swimming is a great workout, but it’s boring as dirt. At least that’s how I felt swimming all through high school. The H2O Audio Tri Pro attempts to be the ultimate answer for that boredom, promising to let you listen to music, podcasts, or whatever else while you’re swimming and, as the name suggests, running and cycling as well. Usingbone conduction, they play audio through your cheek bones, keeping your ears unobstructed so you can maintain the situational awareness you need in those contexts.
The Tri Pro are intended as an upgrade to the Tri headphones, but their one big extra feature is far from brilliant while the price increase is significant. And unless you’re lucky enough to have them fit perfectly right out of the box, you’ll be looking at a pretty awful experience all around.
H2O Audio Tri Pro Multi-Sport with Playlist+
The H2O Audio Tri Pro could be an impressive pair of bone conduction headphones that are ready to go swimming, biking, and running, but their sound quality completely hinges on good fit, and there’s no mechanism for adjusting fit to the multitude of head shapes out there. Considering their only meaningful upgrade to H2O Audio’s standard Tri headphones is a tedious audio recorder, there’s little reason to pay the extra $60 for these.
Price and availability
The H2O Audio Tri Pro have a list price of $179 on H2O Audio’s own website, but has an ongoing discount to $159 and have been listed at $159 on Amazon for months, so we’ll take $159 to be the true price.
Design and fit
The H2O Audio Tri Pro are designed like a great many other bone-conduction headphones. They situate two drivers at the ends of ear hooks and link the two sides with a flexible neckband. The design is nearly identical to the earlier H2O Audio Tri headset.
This design sees the drivers press into the cheekbones right in front of the ears. There are two more bulky bits that sit behind the ears, containing the battery, storage, and controls. Unfortunately, these bits can press rather uncomfortably into the bones there.
Speaking of fit and comfort, it will come down largely to the shape and size of your head. Though the neckband is flexible, it doesn’t adjust to new positions like typical headphone sliders. On my head, the band is stretched wide, which sees the drivers lacking pressure against my cheekbones. The result is much weaker audio unless I have a separate headband or swimming goggles helping press the drivers back down. Wearing the headphones on a walk, I’m not making those accommodations, and get a sub-par audio experience as a result.
Though the headphones are branded as being suited for a triathlon, I also find them particularly uncomfortable for biking, as they aren’t getting held in place by my biking goggles or helmet straps. In fact, both of those items get all awkwardly tangled and bunched up around my ears and with the neckband of the H2O Audio Tri Pro.
The H2O Audio Tri Pro are made to get wet, and as such has an IPX8 rating the company says is good down to three meters underwater with no limit on timing (quite a bit better than what the official IPX8 rating suggests).
The control unit behind the right ear hook is quite simple, with a play button and a + and - button. The play button is responsible for turning on the headphones and switching between Bluetooth and internal storage modes. H2O Audio says it will also call up a voice assistant, but I was unable to get it to do this. The + and - buttons can adjust volume with single taps, skip tracks while held, or switch folders if double-pressed in the local storage mode. The buttons are quite stiff, so long presses and double clicks can be a little tricky.
The headset charges with a special USB cable that has a four-pin adapter on the end with magnetic alignment. While this has worked simply enough for charging the headset, it’s a precarious connection to use for USB data transfer, and I’ve run into issues with the subtlest jostle disrupting the link.
These headphones offer a basic Bluetooth connection for use outside of water. Since Bluetooth doesn’t penetrate water well, they also have 8GB of internal storage for you to load up MP3, WMA, and M4A audio files to play back locally. Those audio files can be transferred from a connected computer over the charging cable.
What sets the H2O Audio Tri Pro apart from the H2O Audio Tri (non-Pro) is the Playlist+ feature. While connected to a Bluetooth source playing audio, a double-press of the + button will begin to record the audio to be saved locally. Want a 5-hour recording? You’ll be running this process for 5 hours. Not only is this an incredibly tedious process for making a recording (think making custom mix tapes on actual tape decks), but it’s likely in a legally gray area, since the headset is making a copy of, presumably, copyrighted content.
H2O Audio’s smartphone app can also start and stop recording for the Playlist+ feature. It’s also essential for re-naming and organizing the recordings. Beyond this, it offers little functionality for the headphones.
Performance and audio quality
Audio quality out of the H2O Audio Tri Pro is hit or miss. Get the drivers situated just right, and it’s impressive, the audio they pump into your head. They have a solid range, getting modest bass alongside balanced mids and treble. What’s especially wild is how the sound shifts when they sink underwater, as now they’re vibrating your cheekbones and the surrounding water, making for an even fuller sound. It can sound a little less precise like this, but it’s a rich listening experience for some heavy jams to stay pumped up during exercise. H2O Audio provides ear plugs to keep the rushing water in your ears from impacting the sound as well.
That said, audio performance depends majorly on fit and pressure. If the pressure loosens up just a little bit, the tone shifts dramatically, the bass increases but is a bit muddy, and the highs and mids become thin and tinny.
While the H2O Audio Tri Pro can seem loud when they’re properly pressed against the cheekbones, they don’t actually cover the ear canal, so it’s easy to hear everything that’s going on around you. With a good fit, I hear external sounds alongside the audio. With a bad fit, external sounds will drown out the audio. In a fairly calm cafe, I had to max out the volume to hear a podcast over the ambient sound, but if I pressed the drivers into my cheekbones, I could hear just fine at lower volumes.
H2O Audio doesn’t make much mention of the microphone on the headphones, and that’s perhaps because it works terribly. In a quiet room, I made a voice recording with the built-in mic, and it hardly picked up any sound. Everything sounded like it was coming through a thick wall. If I spoke very loudly, it did a little better, and if I held the whole headset in front of my mouth it performed better still, but that’s not how anyone should be required to use their headphones for a call.
Battery life is not great for the Tri Pro. They’re rated for 5 hours of runtime, and they take 2 hours to recharge — no quick charge to speak of. At least they hold up to their rated time, draining only about 20% after an hour of mixed use. But they’re decidedly not good when compared to other Bluetooth earbuds you might be looking at which can often run much longer and recharge in a fraction of the time.
Take the EarFun Air Pro 3, for instance. This quality pair of buds can run for up to 9 hours between charges, they carry 36 extra hours in the charging case. The Tri Pro even look bad next to H2O Audio’s own alternatives, like the Sonar headphones, which offer 7 hours of battery life and cost much less.
Competition
The H2O Audio Tri Pro face some serious competition from their own sibling. TheH2O Audio Trimay have a list price of $149, which wouldn’t make them much cheaper, but they’re regularly discounted to $99. At that price, they’re a substantially lower outlay, and all you’ll really miss out on is the dubious Playlist+ feature of the Tri Pro. It’s a similar story for the company’s Sonar headphones, which are designed specifically to strap to swim goggles and do so quite effectively.
You could go with something from a competitor, like the Shokz OpenSwim, but you’ll pay $150, get less storage, and run into similar fitment issues.
Should you buy them?
The H2O Audio Tri Pro just aren’t great. They sound decent in water and can go deep, but they don’t add much to the package — beyond a questionable and tedious audio recorder — over the standard Tri. If you’re lucky enough to be able to get a good fit, you’ll save a bunch of money and be served more or less just as well by the standard Tri. And fit is a concern, as the headphones’ flexibility doesn’t actually mean they can adjust to different head shapes.
With little extra to offer at $159, the Tri Pro don’t merit the extra money you’ll spend on them instead of one of their competitors. If they lasted longer on a charge or had upgraded storage, they might have justified their existence, but as it is, they just serve as a strong case for H2O Audio’s cheaper options.
