Nank’s Runner Diver2 headphones might just be great for gaming as well

The quest for perfect gaming headphones has taken me far and wide over the years. I have fallen for some nonsense marketing in my time, broken more headgear than I ever could have imagined possible, and now, find myself wondering why I have never tried bone conductive headphones before, and not just for the reasons they say on the box.

Truth is, I used to run, I don’t anymore, and I don’t swim, certainly not enough to justify an outlay on headphones to do so. I’d be too scared of not hearing the sharks sneaking up on me.

What I do find though is how anti-social headphones can be. If the rest of the family is watching some trash like The Masked Singer on TV and I am trying to at least be present (while sitting in the corner on my Steam Deck) I obviously can’t have the sound on without headphones. And then, every five seconds one of the kids is asking me something and I have to remove the headphones – I know, I know, first world problems – get rid of the kids.

Bone conductive headphones, and in particular these bone conductive headphones from Nank have let me discover the best of both worlds.

Best of both worlds

You see bone conductive headphones use science cleverer than I am to transmit the sound through your skull and bones in your ears, rather than ramming a small speaker into your earhole and blocking out the sound entirely.

This makes them safer to use when out running or cycling because you are much more aware of your surroundings and can hear that lunatic jogging up behind you with a ball hammer. Rather, these headphones wrap over your ears, apply pressure behind them and then nestle in front, meaning you can still have a conversation but listen to your music or game audio at the same time. Why hasn’t anybody thought of these for gaming before?

While I am writing, I also have always liked the idea of playing music in the background, but yet I am not one of those people who can listen to music while writing as I find it too distracting. What I have found with Nank’s Runner Diver 2s however is that I can wear them and play low ambient or lo-fi music around my ears and actually find it really enjoyable and not distracting in the slightest. In fact, I have hardly had them off for the last couple of weeks, I am that amazed by them.

With magnetic charging and a 10-hour battery life I just need to pop them onto the juice every day – perhaps the battery could be better but ultimately, even though they are not as small as AirPods the actual bits driving the sound are, so large batteries would make them more cumbersome and this whole unit comes in at a crazy 32 grams.

Novel features

Another neat thing which is aimed more at the swimmers out there is that they come with three pairs of silicon sound enhancers – these come in small, medium, and large size and push into your ear to block out the sounds of, for example, being underwater. They weren’t for me but I can see why they would be handy.

Also, the headphones come with another unique feature of 32GB of onboard MP3 storage (only, no FLAC here), so you can store you own music on them and Spotify be damned. Again handy if you have no signal because you are, er, swimming the English Channel or something. The only downside here is the transfer rate is so slow it takes an age to copy on a couple of albums so I didn’t use them for that either. A nice addition for some people, however.

The Nank Runner Diver2 headphones have opened my ears to a whole area of audio I have previously ignored. One where you can remain sociable and still play your games in peace. That has to be worth the £90 asking price on Nank’s website right now.