Audio Archives - ��ϳԹ�� Online

The Best New Sport Earbuds (2024)

Bethany Mavis — Wed, 30 Oct 2024 18:47:01 +0000

The winners of this year’s sport earbuds test came from brands that range from three-year-old startups to longtime audio stalwarts, a testament to how dialed the technology has become. Each year we see more and more bargain models (under $70) on the market that, if you didn’t check the price tag, you might think went for $100, or twice that. And every year brings more new and clever features, like in-ear detection and sound profiles to suit your taste for bass vs. treble. Then there’s active noise cancellation (ANC), which first came to earbuds some five years ago but has become commonplace, perhaps an indicator that the world around us really needs to shut the hell up, and that we all—whether running, doing yoga, or commuting—can best find our sweet spot when alone in our particular sound cave.

One thing ��ϳԹ�� readers can appreciate is the increasing ruggedness and water resistance in almost any pair of buds you might acquire—even those that don’t have high are likely able to survive a walk in the rain or a drop into a puddle and still keep doing what they do. With less and less to separate high-end products from low-end, the differentiators are becoming more a question of how much care and attention to detail are put into the product.

Updated October 2024: We’ve added three new picks from Denon, Suunto, and Treblab, and updated the retailers and pricing of all the earbuds.

At a Glance

Best All-Around:
Best High-Fidelity:
Best Open-Ear:
Best for Long Hours:
Best for Runners:
Best for Smaller Ears:
Killer Value:
How to Choose Earbuds
How We Test
Meet Our Lead Tester

If you buy through our links, we may earn an affiliate commission. This supports our mission to get more people active and outside. Learn more.

(Photo: Courtesy Marshall)

Best All-Around

Marshall Motif II ANC

Pros and Cons
⊕ Top-notch, dynamic sound
⊕ Rockin’ design
⊕ Highly grippable stems
⊗ Shorter-than-average battery life

In testing, connectivity proved flawless, and their active noise cancellation (ANC) was very effective, though a step below Apple’s model. One tester did find that their robust design meant they needed occasional fit adjustment during runs, and their IPX5 protection means they’re not rated to keep out dust and solids, but they will do fine with heavy rain, sweat, or sea spray. Battery life is the only real downside: They play for just 6 hours with ANC engaged or 9 hours without (similar to the AirPods Pro but 2–3 hours less than competitors like Sony, Sennheiser, and JLabs) and the case holds four extra charges. But with the “best sound quality of all the buds in this test,” according to one tester, and a design that made everyone take notice, the Motif II ANCs take home our top prize for their character and quality.

Read our full review of the Marshall Motif II ANC.

(Photo: Courtesy Denon)

Best High-Fidelity

Denon PerL True Wireless Earbuds

Pros and Cons
⊕ Rich, dynamic sound
⊕ Impressive app
⊕ Customizable sound profile
⊗ Chunky size

“Each product is hand-tuned by our sound master,” Denon says of the PerLs, and while we don’t know exactly what that means, it speaks to the Japanese DNA in these premium-sounding buds. Take the accompanying software, for instance: The first thing you do with these wireless buds is download an app that streams a series of sounds and frequencies into your ears to measure how you hear, then creates a personalized profile that transforms how good music sounds. It’s one of the best uses of a headphone app we’ve seen.

The PerLs came across as lively but not piercing on the high end, with realism and verve. There’s even a high-gain option on the app that boosts volume for quiet recordings, which one tester called “a welcome feature that I would love to see in a lot of sometimes anemic Bluetooth earbuds.” These capabilities are made possible by a series of ultra-sensitive microphones, which probably explains their rather enormous size—one reviewer called them “sharp-edged Alka-Seltzer tablet earbud bodies” and noted, “I had to remove the supplied fin attachment before these felt okay.”

Others liked the fit and found them great for running, where they kept the adrenaline flowing with some of the best full-on rocking-out sound in the test. “St. Vincent and Spoon sounded like I was listening to vinyl,” one tester said. The active noise cancellation is decent, the six hours of battery is average (with two more charges from the case), and an IPX4 rating means they can handle a light rain. Given the quality and attention to detail, we consider these a true bargain at $139 or less.

(Photo: Courtesy Suunto)

Best Open-Ear

Suunto Sonic

Pros and Cons
⊕ Safe in traffic
⊕ Secure fit
⊗ Limited, soundwise
⊗ No portable power bank

This year Suunto entered the “open-ear” category that was pioneered by Shokz and has continually improved with brands like H2O Audio. The design uses bone conduction technology to feed music directly to your inner ear, leaving your ear canal wide open to take in the sounds around you. It seems pretty advanced, but for music lovers the tech has severe limitations. And Suunto hasn’t exactly overcome them: The Sonic doesn’t have the power to produce vibrant bass—or even to play loud. If it did, it would vibrate to the point of tickling you to death.

As a runner, however, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed this unit for listening to podcasts, which they do admirably while allowing me to hear when someone is passing me on the trail (an increasingly frequent occurrence). For those who want to optimize safety, like runners who need to contend with traffic, and for sports that require hearing other people (skiers, climbers, skaters, cyclists …) they’re a very smart option.

The 10-hour battery life (with no charging case for backup) lets you get your miles in, and a five-minute recharge provides three additional hours. The behind-the-neck band is comfortable and keeps them firmly in place. IP55 sweat and water resistance allows you to wear them through a downpour, and if you’re like me you’ll also love using them indoors: They’re perfect for watching Netflix on my laptop while working in the kitchen, without taking away my wife’s ability to walk in and bug me.

(Photo: Courtesy Treblab)

Best for Long Hours

Treblab X3 Pro True Wireless Earbuds

Pros and Cons
⊕ Crazy-long battery life
⊕ Secure fit
⊕ Good sound for the price
⊗ Oversize carrying case

If you are especially averse to earbuds that lose power quickly or slowly start to slide their way out of your ears as you move about, these are the solution for you. With a whopping 145 hours of available playtime (nine hours per charge plus 15 more in the charging case), the X3 Pros are designed for those folks who would rather plug in once a week and not have to think about the battery. The trade-off is a bulky case that doesn’t slide readily into your shorts pocket but does have a handy battery-life readout built into the side.

The IPX5 sweat- and water-resistant buds also come with ear hooks, a basic approach to a secure fit that has stuck around because it works. The sound quality is good if not at the level of the premium models here, and the build seems flimsy but held up throughout testing. Another nice touch is ENC (environmental noise cancellation), which enhances the sound quality, not for you but for the person on the other end of a call. They don’t, however, come with ANC. While the X3 Pros are no-frills, one reviewer found these workhorses “my hands-down favorite for trail running.”

(Photo: Courtesy Beats)

Best for Runners

Beats Studio Buds +

Pros and Cons
⊕ Easy to use
⊕ Secure fit
⊕ Consistently good sound
⊗ Limited grip area makes them easy to drop

We also liked the push controls on the outside of each bud, which never accidentally paused tracks the way touch controls sometimes do. Similarly, they don’t have in-ear detection, a feature some of our testers find aggravating. Forgot to charge them? A five-minute plug-in adds a quick hour of playback time. While their diminutive size can make them hard to grasp when plucking them out of the magnetic case, we nevertheless found ourselves reaching for them routinely, especially when heading to the trail. And as you’d expect from the brand, the Studio Buds + look sleek and wholly of the moment—we especially approved of the transparent option, but the ivory and black/gold opaque models are also appropriately sporty.

(Photo: Courtesy Raycon)

Best for Smaller Ears

Raycon Fitness Earbuds

Pros and Cons
⊕ Extreme portability
⊕ Surprisingly bold sound
⊗ A bit on the fragile side
⊗ More likely to be lost

The Fitness Earbuds come with helpful touch controls for volume, ANC, and even three different sound profiles (more bass, etc.), and their multipoint feature lets you connect to both phone and laptop at the same time. IPX7 water-resistance means they can handle rain and even short periods of total immersion. One tester who works as a carpenter wore them at work and “never had any issues with them being affected by sweat or sawdust.”

(Photo: Courtesy JLab)

Killer Value

JLab GO Air Sport

Pros and Cons
⊕ Exceptional value
⊕ Secure fit
⊗ Infrequent pairing issues
⊗ Some tunes can sound tinny

For those who put their buds through hell, there’s nothing to dislike in this smooth-sounding unit, given that they come with a replacement cost that is less than a pizza with all the toppings. Their comfortable, bendy ear hooks all but guarantee a secure fit during workouts, even if your workouts involve handstands. With an IP55 rating, they can handle dust and moderate rain. “These were my go-to earbuds for durability,” said our Anchorage-based tester. “I tested them on trail runs and hikes during misty Alaska rains. They are very durable and did not fall out of my ears or seem to be affected by rain or sweat.”

While one runner on the test crew found the relatively large case a bit cumbersome to carry in a pocket, the 8-hour charge was adequate for most workouts and daylong activities (and the case provides another 24 hours). As for that case: We like that it has its own built-in USB charging cord. The touch controls are nice to have but don’t always perform as expected, and the earbuds do not come with ANC, though at this price that shouldn’t be an expectation. Based on their durability, clear sound, reliable connectivity, and price, they make perfect sense for more rough-and-tumble activities or as a backup to pricier headsets.

How to Choose Earbuds

Earbuds are more like shoes than most other gear categories: so much depends on the right fit. What comfortably fits one person’s ears may not suit another’s, and there’s more to it than size. The internal anatomy of the ear makes certain designs actually sound better to one person than the next. If you can’t try them out at a store or borrow them from a friend, it may be best to buy them from a retailer with a good return policy. Once you have them in hand, do some real-world tests with the different tip sizes, and trade them in if you aren’t in love.

If you want to get serious about the perfect fit, consider aftermarket foam eartips, like . In addition to helping with a more secure fit, they provide passive noise isolation, which can improve the experience with both ANC-equipped and ANC-less earbuds. Should fit issues persist, consider a model with behind-the-ear hooks, like the JLab GO Air Sport reviewed here.

Also give some thought to which features do it for you: Some people like sleek touch controls, others prefer old-school push buttons; some like to tap for quick pausing, others would rather forgo that feature and pull out one bud to ask for directions, so as to avoid the annoyance of unwanted pauses every time your fingers go near them. And if you live in a rainy climate, be sure to choose ones with an IP rating ending in 4 or higher (as all the models here do).

Finally, be aware that there are more specialized designs emerging and getting better each year–like these earbuds for , others for , and for those who want to stay more tuned in to their surroundings.

How We Test

Number of Miles Run During Testing: 415
Number of Miles Cycled: 154
Number of Dogs Walked: 8
Hours of Podcasts Consumed During Travel: 45
Coldest Temp: –3, Anchorage, Alaska
Warmest Temp: 102, Tucson, Arizona
Highest Elevation: 12,341 feet, Deception Peak, New Mexico
Most Remote Testing Location: Antarctica
Most Listened-To Tracks: Aphex Twin: “#3,” Billie Eilish: “Bad Guy,” Biosphere: “Baby Satellite,” Christian McBride and Edgar Meyer: “Barnyard Disturbance,” Fontaines D.C.: “Favourite,” J Dilla: “Last Donut of the Night,” Kendrick Lamar: “Not Like Us,” Orbital and Sleaford Mods: “Dirty Rat,” The Replacements: “Kiss Me On the Bus,” Tyler, The Creator: “New Magic Wand”

The first thing we do with any earbuds, headphones, or speakers is attempt to pair them with our phones without consulting the user manual: the quicker, more intuitive, and easier the Bluetooth setup, the more points scored. Then we put them through rigorous hours of testing doing the kinds of things ��ϳԹ�� readers do—from dog walks to HIIT workouts, from fireside listening to our day jobs, which for one of us is at the local woodworking shop. Our testers, who range in location from Alaska to Berkeley to Santa Fe to New York City, spent hours in them, bouncing up and down on trails, treadmills, and trains.

Our team turns in reports on each product tested, providing a score from 1 to 10 for five different measures: sound quality, pairing and connectivity, fit and comfort, rain and drop protection, and user friendliness. Scores are averaged, with more weight given to sound quality and (knowing our audience) how well they stand up to the elements. Note: Battery life estimates in these reviews are based on manufacturer specs; it’s difficult to confirm those numbers, given the time involved and variances among user habits (different volumes, different uses, different functions enabled). Actual results may be 10 to 20 percent lower, judging from averages experienced in general testing.

Meet Our Lead Tester

Will Palmer has been testing gear for 20 years for ��ϳԹ��, where he was managing editor and copy chief for nine years. Based in Santa Fe, he has been a runner since 1984, and while the mile counts have decreased over the years, he’s kept motivated to head out the door on the hottest, coldest, and wettest days by the opportunity to test the best new products—and to commune with the junipers and piñons.

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Behind the Scenes of the Funniest Story ��ϳԹ�� Ever Published

jversteegh — Wed, 14 Aug 2024 11:00:26 +0000

This story update is part of the ��ϳԹ��, a series highlighting the best writing we’ve ever published, along with author interviews and other exclusive bonus materials. Read “The King of the Ferret Leggers,” by Donald Katz here.

“The King of the Ferret Leggers,” which appeared in the February–March 1983 issue of ��ϳԹ��, tells the story of a Yorkshireman named Reg Mellor who, for sport, puts two ferrets down his pants and then stoically endures as the rodents run and claw, bite and dangle, for five-plus hours. Details on the activity, which peaked in the 1970s, are a little sketchy, but it appears that all you needed was a field for spectators to stand around in, some self-appointed judges, and at least one contestant. Oh, and the competitors had to go commando: no underpants.

The author of this tale was Don Katz. Forty-two years later, he’s recounting the legend of this piece to me while sitting inside a majestically repurposed church in Newark, New Jersey, global headquarters of the company he founded: , the world’s leading creator and seller of audiobooks and other original content. Katz recently stepped back from his longtime position as CEO, but he remains active and keeps an office in town. He also remains close to Newark Venture Partners, a social-impact early-stage investment fund, and Audible’s Global Center for Urban Innovation; he established both to focus on solutions to urban inequities, after moving Audible to Newark in 2007.

��ٳ�’s Rolling Stone ID from 1977 (Photo: Courtesy Don Katz)

Hold on a minute: the guy who wrote a piece about ferrets gnawing a man’s privates is the same guy who created Audible? Yes, and a common thread runs through ��ٳ�’s writing career and the business he built: a love of story.

In late 1982, Katz submitted the ferret-king piece to John Rasmus, then ��ܳٲ��’s editor in chief. This was back in the magazine’s primordial days, when it was still finding its voice. Rasmus loved it. Then the artwork came in—a graphic image by , the famous Rolling Stone artist, showing Reg on the field of battle, clad in baggy pants that appear to be spraying blood.

Rasmus: “I said, ‘Uh-oh.’ ”

Katz had talked Steadman—his good friend and colleague from their days as Rolling Stone contributors in England, where Katz had moved to study at the London School of Economics before getting started as a writer—into illustrating the piece. Delicately, Rasmus nestled the article and its vivid depiction into the issue, running it with a brief subhead (“A True Story”) under the rubric “Revelries of the Rustics.”

It’s not an exaggeration to say that this piece became talismanic for the magazine. “It gave us all kinds of good reasons to do stories like ‘Ferret Leggers,’ ” says Rasmus, who in 2017 wrote a tribute to it for ��ܳٲ��’s 40th anniversary issue. It also helped establish that an ��ϳԹ�� story could be literary, visceral, and funny at the same time, often involving a protagonist who must do a particular thing because, to paraphrase George Mallory, it is there to be done.

“Ferret Leggers” is so good that it was stolen many times, even before the internet made that easy to do. People typed it up, put their name on it, and got it published. Katz, who for years worked as an award-winning magazine writer and author, spent more time than he wanted to cease-and-desisting these thieves.

��ٳ�’s decision to write for a living, and in particular his ability to hear and employ the oral traditions of storytelling in his work, was born in the early 1970s, when he studied at New York University under , the author of the classic novel Invisible Man. The idea of what Ellison called the “musicality” of the spoken word surely was lodged in ��ٳ�’s head while he labored to bring Audible to life. It wasn’t easy. The company would eventually become a huge success, but after the dot-com bust of 1999, Audible traded for as little as four cents a share. It took a decade to make a profit.

��ٳ�’s two career arcs reminded me of something he wrote about ferrets back in ’83. This creature, he observed, has one very good trait: “a tenacious, single-minded belief in finishing whatever it starts.”

Katz in upstate New York, reporting an early ��ϳԹ�� article called “Bert, a Dawg” (Photo: Courtesy Don Katz)

OUTSIDE: As a character, Reg Mellor is hilariously over-the-top, and I think some readers today may wonder if he treated his athletes with the respect and care they deserved.
KATZ: Well, Reg would have said that the real athletes were the tiny cohort of humans who subjected themselves to ferrets being put in this uncaring and potentially cruel situation. My story set out to be a literary satire, pitting legendarily tough Brits from a specific county against equally tough animals, which, as few readers would have known, had been raised and deployed for generations to chase other animals out of holes for the benefit of hunters. There’s no doubt that there were plenty of people around England more than 40 years ago—when there was a movement to outlaw ferrets as pets due to various attacks that happened inside homes—who gave me statements and assertions that became my description of exaggerated ferret fury. But ferret legging was a clearly unacceptable treatment of sentient beings. From my view—as someone who’s aware of emerging science about animals and the father of a vegan animal-rights activist—it’s good that this is no longer a thing, which leaves my literary excursion into irony as a cultural artifact of another time and place.

How did you get the idea to write “The King of the Ferret Leggers”?
When I got to England in the mid-seventies, there was this satirical, couched-in-gossip magazine called Private Eye. I saw a squib in there about someone named Reg Mellor, who had retired in disgust from a competition called ferret legging because he was able to do it for so long that everyone in the stands got bored and left.

I pulled the page out of the magazine and thought: That is so weird. Someday, I’d like to find out what that is.

I bounced the idea off Ralph Steadman, who was already famous in the United States for his Rolling Stone work with Hunter S. Thompson. I kind of put us together as a package. For whatever reason, I got the OK from ��ϳԹ�� to do it.

The story was published, and it fairly immediately became a cult thing. People passed it around at cafés, as if we were living in the days of Victorian poetry. Writers sent it to each other, and it started to have, you know, buzz—and all sorts of unintended consequences for me.

Such as?
Right around that time, I had this idea of trying to write a big story about Nike. The head of Nike, Phil Knight, had never given interviews. I sent him “Ferret Leggers.” He loved it. I got the OK to enter Knight’s world, and that experience grew into my 1994 book, Just Do It: The Nike Spirit in the Corporate World.

I’ve read that “Ferret Leggers” was stolen a bunch of times.
The story comes out, and I go back to writing books and other magazine articles. Then I get a phone call from a friend who was talking to another friend in Germany who was raving about this hysterical article in a major German magazine, about a man in Yorkshire, England, who puts ferrets down his pants.

“You’ve been plagiarized,” he said. I lawyered up and was paid triple damages—which wasn’t that much because of how small my ��ϳԹ�� fee was. But at the time I needed the money!

In the late 1990s, when the Unix-based Internet was becoming the World Wide Web, I became aware that the story was available online with other people’s bylines on it. I remember writing to some person at Carnegie Mellon University who was trying to publish it under his name.

I said, “You might not know the concept of intellectual property, but I wrote that. I basically live on that story being republished.” And the kid wrote back, saying, “You old fart, you should be happy that anyone even cares about a story you wrote in 1983.” He attached various manifestos that said information should be free, which was one of the early ideas defining the Internet: to wipe out professional-grade content in favor of the crowd’s content.

Later, when Audible was designing the first download service for content—and inventing the first digital-audio player, which came out almost five years before the iPod—I asked our engineers to create an encryption system that would at least cow the people who wanted to steal others’ work. I said at the time: “If we’re going to sustain the professional creative class through this digital transformation, there have to be some protections. Otherwise, no one’s ever going to get paid.” That was key to Audible’s formation, and a focus on powerfully composed and artfully performed words was fundamental during the 27 years I ran the thing.

For many people the writer-to-tech-CEO trajectory might be confusing at first, but it makes sense that the common link is a love of words.
That’s right. Audible was an idea and a company culture led by a writer. And the truth is, I daydream in prose.

How did you get the elite venture capitalists who backed you to believe in a writer who wanted to create a media category based on technologies that didn’t yet exist?
Well, some of them didn’t believe. But because I’d studied and written about businesses large and small, I knew that getting a business going required capital, and I would need to deploy language and stories that would overcome perceived risk. I discovered, for instance, that 93 million Americans sat in traffic jams driving to and from work—which meant there were hundreds of millions of hours per week that Audible could fill with a premium service offering self-selected entertainment, education, and information. This was a key point in the original business plan. Consumers could “arbitrage” their time, I argued, by programming their own listening time. They could make dead time come alive and get to work smarter than the person in the next cube.

That’s a daunting leap.
The technology-invention risk, on top of the market risk, was real, but I used my journalistic training to be honest about what I didn’t know, and to find expert fellow pioneers and employees to supplement that. The realities of financial and cultural success took much longer to achieve than I expected, but from the beginning I thought—and preached—that digital technology could create an Audible-spawned media category alongside music, books, and other printed material, along with all permutations of film and video. I didn’t go so far as to attribute this to what I learned as an English major mentored by Ralph Ellison, or go on as I did later about why Stephen Crane and Mark Twain wrote like Americans because of their ability to listen to the polyglot sound of Americans talking. But these things were never far from my thoughts.

You also had to invent the technology and the hardware to make it happen. You had to invent the Audible MobilePlayer and a way to download encrypted files. And last but not least, you had to persuade the book publishers to license the rights to books.
Despite the efficiencies of never being out of stock in digital, and the price benefits of no physical packaging, resistance from the publishing establishment was intense. There remained an aristocratic strain within the publishing elite that did not want this change.

This seems like the right time to tell you that, by studying your vast oeuvre—magazine pieces, books, and Audible itself—I’ve identified themes that run through your work. May I try them out on you?
I love that you did that.

My first theory is that you’re drawn to people—you may be one of those people—whom the mainstream considers to be, uh, crazy. People who have outrageous ideas and pursue them. Reg Mellor is such a person.
Definitely true. I also think of them as relentless people who just don’t give up on ideas. In my case, the shift from writing to creating Audible was, even to myself, something of a mystery.

Two more themes: you’re drawn to endurance and domination. Both apply in “Ferret Leggers,” but also in ��ϳԹ�� stories like your profile of the father of fitness, Jack LaLanne, which was memorably called “Jack LaLanne Is Still an Animal.”
Jack was such a fascinating, bloody-minded character. He was 80 when I spent time with him, and I think of him often now, as I navigate the realities of aging alongside continued aggressive physical activity.

And, obviously, in the story of Audible, which hung by a thread several times between 1995 and its sale to Amazon in 2008. By 2023, according to one statistic I saw, Audible dominated the U.S. audiobook business, with nearly two-thirds of the market.
There are many ways to define business success, and Audible has clearly achieved a startling level of it by traditional metrics. But what has always mattered to me are the lives that Audible touches in so many ways across listeners, writers, actors, and employees. But there’s no question that if you want to pursue ideas that others may view as unlikely, you better need to win and fear failure in ways most others do not.

Do you have any regrets?
That I was never good enough to be an NHL player. I’m a lifelong hockey player. I would have traded in any of it to be a professional.

The post Behind the Scenes of the Funniest Story ��ϳԹ�� Ever Published appeared first on ��ϳԹ�� Online.

The Story of ��ܳٲ��’s Funniest Story

jversteegh — Wed, 14 Aug 2024 11:00:10 +0000

What’s stranger than a story about people stuffing ferrets down their pants? How about that story leading the writer to create one of the largest, most successful digital media companies, ever. When ��ϳԹ����ܲ��The King of the Ferret Leggers, by Don Katz, more than 30 years ago, it became an instant classic and is now considered the funniest story ��ϳԹ�� has ever published. But what people don’t know is that writing the piece began a long, strange journey that ended with Katz founding audio giant Audible.

The post The Story of ��ܳٲ��’s Funniest Story appeared first on ��ϳԹ�� Online.

The Best New Sport Earbuds and Headphones of 2024

jversteegh — Mon, 29 Jan 2024 18:28:37 +0000

The winners of this year’s audio tests came from brands that range from three-year-old startups to longtime audio stalwarts, a testament to how dialed the technology has become. Each year we see more and more bargain models on the market that, if you didn’t check the price tag, you might think went for $100, or twice that. And every year brings more new and clever features, like in-ear detection and sound profiles to suit your taste for bass vs. treble. Then there’s active noise cancellation (ANC), which first came to earbuds some five years ago but has become commonplace, perhaps an indicator that the world around us really needs to shut the hell up, and that we all—whether running, doing yoga, or commuting—can best find our sweet spot when alone in our particular sound cave. One thing ��ϳԹ�� readers can appreciate is the increasing ruggedness and water resistance in basically any pair of buds you might acquire—even those that don’t have high are likely able to survive a walk in the rain or a drop into a puddle and still keep doing what they do. With less and less to separate high-end products from low-end, the differentiators are becoming more a question of how much care and attention to detail are put into the product.

Read on for our winners, from deserving buds of all shapes and sizes to the best premium travel headphones.

Updated August 2024: We’ve updated the formatting of this guide and updated the retailers and pricing of our picks.

At a Glance

Best All-Around:
Best for Runners:
Best for Smaller Ears:
Killer Value:
Best Travel Headphones:
How to Choose Earbuds
How We Test
Meet Our Lead Tester

If you buy through our links, we may earn an affiliate commission. This supports our mission to get more people active and outside. Learn more.

(Photo: Courtesy Marshall)

Best All-Around

Marshall Motif II ANC

Pros and Cons
⊕ Top-notch, dynamic sound
⊕ Rockin’ design
⊕ Highly grippable stems
⊗ Shorter-than-average battery life

The Motif II ANCs have the same popular stem design as Apple’s beloved AirPods Pro but cling to your ears even better. Like the AirPods Pro, they sound fantastic, with faithful, crystal-clear highs, mids, and lows (and no artificial, random bass boosting), and come with a versatile app that includes a custom equalizer (where, yes, you can add more bass). But unlike the AirPods Pro, the Motif II ANC earbuds carry Marshall’s pedigree classic rock aesthetic, which is actually very useful: the grippy metal stems make them much easier to handle, and the textured vinyl case feels indestructible. They even come in at $50 less than Apple’s counterpart. In testing, connectivity proved flawless, and their active noise cancellation (ANC) was very effective, though a step below Apple’s model. One tester did find that their robust design meant they needed occasional fit adjustment during runs, and their IPX5 protection means they’re not rated to keep out dust and solids, but they will do fine with heavy rain, sweat, or sea spray. Battery life is the only real downside: They play for just 6 hours with ANC engaged or 9 hours without (similar to the AirPods Pro but 2–3 hours less than competitors like Sony, Sennheiser, and JLabs) and the case holds four extra charges. But with the “best sound quality of all the buds in this test,” according to one tester, and a design that made everyone take notice, the Motif II A.N.C.s take home our top prize for their character and quality.

Read our full review of the Marshall Motif II ANC.

(Photo: Courtesy Beats)

Best for Runners

Beats Studio Buds +

Pros and Cons
⊕ Easy to use
⊕ Secure fit
⊕ Consistently good sound
⊗ Limited grip area makes them easy to drop

The well-engineered Studio Buds + are our top pick for runners because of their light weight and small profile, staying in place well while you bob about. One tester, who even used them while paddleboarding, found that they “fit really well immediately out of the box and never fell out or needed adjusting.” They didn’t, however, boast the lockdown security of the “wingtips” that came built-in on the earlier (and still available) . The Studio Buds + are an improvement over their predecessors (same name sans the +), with upgrades that include better ANC and longer battery life (6 hours with ANC on, 9 hours without). With an IPX4 protection rating, they held up against sweat and light rain. This model put extra oomph in our strides with bassier but nice ’n’ clear sound, similar to that of the Apple AirPods Pro. ANC on the Studio Buds + is only middle of the pack but did a decent job blocking out the chatter in a crowded coffeehouse, and Beats tripled the size of the microphones for a call quality that impressed testers. We also liked the push controls on the outside of each bud, which never accidentally paused tracks the way touch controls sometimes do. Similarly, they don’t have in-ear detection, a feature some of our testers find aggravating. Forgot to charge them? A five-minute plug-in adds a quick hour of playback time. While their diminutive size can make them hard to grasp when plucking them out of the magnetic case, we nevertheless found ourselves reaching for them routinely, especially when heading to the trail. And as you’d expect from the brand, the Studio Buds + look sleek and wholly of the moment—we especially approved of the transparent option, but the ivory and black/gold opaque models are also appropriately sporty.

(Photo: Courtesy Raycon)

Best for Smaller Ears

Raycon Fitness Earbuds

Pros and Cons
⊕ Extreme portability
⊕ Surprisingly bold sound
⊗ A bit on the fragile side
⊗ More likely to be lost

The magic in the straightforwardly named Fitness Earbuds lies in their barely-there size. Both the lightweight buds and the case—which fits in the palm of your hand and slips discreetly into any pocket—are tiny. This makes it all the more impressive that they can pump out rich, deep sound for 12 hours on a charge (with ANC off) and hold 44 more hours of recharging in the case. One of our testers, a runner with several ear piercings, said “these felt the most comfortable and secure in my ears,” a fact that is helped by the soft stabilizing fins that cleverly slip on and off depending on your preference. Folks with larger ears enjoyed them too but did have occasional trouble with them falling out. The Fitness Earbuds come with helpful touch controls for volume, ANC, and even three different sound profiles (more bass, etc.), and their multipoint feature lets you connect to both phone and laptop at the same time. IPX7 water-resistance means they can handle rain and even short periods of total immersion. One tester who works as a carpenter wore them at work and “never had any issues with them being affected by sweat or sawdust.”

(Photo: Courtesy JLab)

Killer Value

JLab GO Air Sport

Pros and Cons
⊕ Exceptional value
⊕ Secure fit
⊗ Infrequent pairing issues
⊗ Some tunes can sound tinny

For those who put their buds through hell, there’s nothing to dislike in this smooth-sounding unit, given that they come with a replacement cost that is barely more than a pizza with all the toppings. Their comfortable, bendy, ear hooks all but guarantee a secure fit during workouts, even if your workouts involve handstands. With an IP55 rating, they can handle dust and moderate rain. “These were my go-to earbuds for durability,” said our Anchorage-based tester. “I tested them on trail runs and hikes during misty Alaska rains. They are very durable and did not fall out of my ears or seem to be affected by rain or sweat.” While one runner on the test crew found the relatively large case a bit cumbersome to carry in a pocket, the 8-hour charge was adequate for most workouts and daylong activities (and the case provides another 24 hours). As for that case: We like that it has its own built-in USB charging cord. The touch controls are nice to have but don’t always perform as expected, and the earbuds do not come with ANC, though at this price that shouldn’t be an expectation. Based on their durability, clear sound, reliable connectivity, and price, they make perfect sense for more rough-and-tumble activities or as a backup to pricier headsets.

(Photo: Courtesy Bowers & Wilkins)

Best Travel Headphones

Bowers & Wilkins Px7 S2e

Pros and Cons
⊕ Excellent sound
⊕ Invitingly discreet design
⊗ Not suitable for adventures

“These are the best-sounding over-ear wireless headphones I’ve experienced,” one of our veteran testers exclaimed. In a category dominated by the likes of Bose, Sony, and Apple, it’s refreshing that this year’s most inviting travel headphones come from a legendary British audiophile brand, founded in 1966, known for its excellent but pricey and historically not rugged headphones. The Px7 S2e addresses both of those issues, quietly going about its business with a solidly built and thrilling-to-listen-to product at a price that is perfectly reasonable. We gave them style points for a nice range of beautiful, nature-based color options, from the standard Anthracite Black to Cloud Grey, Ocean Blue, and Forest Green. The active noise cancellation, while not best in class, does a decent job, using four microphones to adapt to your surrounding soundscape, and they come with a barebones but serviceable app. Battery life is a stellar 30 hours, and a 15-minute charge provides seven additional hours. While testers wished they could reach slightly higher volumes, bass-heavy head-bopping isn’t what these are made for. “If you want balance, resolution, accuracy, transparency, and deeply pleasurable naturalness, this one delivers,” a tester wrote. They do fall short in packability—one tester noted, “it would be nice if they folded”—and we wouldn’t advise wearing them in a downpour, but the Px7 S2e comes with a sturdy protective case that will stand up to a certain degree of rough handling. Just remember to pack it in your carry-on.

How to Choose Earbuds

How We Test

Number of Miles Run During Testing: 255
Number of Dogs Walked: 8
Yoga Sessions: 7
Hours of Podcasts Consumed During Travel: 28
Coldest Temp: –3, Anchorage, Alaska
Warmest Temp: 90, Santa Fe, New Mexico
Most Remote Testing Location: Antarctica
Most Listened-To Tracks: Japanese Breakfast: “Paprika,” Bob Marley and the Wailers: “Natural Mystic,” Wet Leg: “Chaise Longue,” Danger Mouse and Black Thought, feat. MF Doom: “Belize,” Kelly Lee Owens: “Moebius,” Brian Eno: “Discreet Music,” Sam Fender: “Hypersonic Missiles”

Meet Our Lead Tester

Will Palmer has been testing gear for 20 years for ��ϳԹ��, where he was managing editor and copy chief for nine years. Based in Santa Fe, he has been a runner since 1984, and while the mile counts have decreased over the years, he’s kept motivated to head out the door on the hottest, coldest, and wettest days by the opportunity to test the best new products—and to commune with the junipers and piñons.

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We Loved the Classic Look of These Earbuds from Marshall. Then We Were Wowed by Their Sound Quality.

jversteegh — Sun, 28 Jan 2024 16:00:07 +0000

The story goes that in the early 1960s, John Entwistle, bassist for The Who, couldn’t hear his instrument over the clamorous drums of his maniac bandmate, Keith Moon, so he asked London drum shop owner Jim Marshall to build him a louder amplifier. This resulted in guitarist Pete Townshend needing a louder amp from Marshall so he could hear his guitar over Entwistle’s bass—and thus was Marshall able to go into business making history’s most beloved amps.

Updated August 2024: We’ve updated the formatting of this review and updated the retailers and pricing of the product.

Marshall Motif II ANC

Pros and Cons
⊕ Top-notch, dynamic sound
⊕ Rockin’ design
⊕ Highly grippable stems
⊗ Shorter-than-average battery life

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Sixty years later, the Marshall company has smartly reapplied its rich pedigree, bringing its engineering know-how to today’s consumers by producing (in conjunction with Zound Industries) a stellar line of headphones, earbuds, and Bluetooth speakers, like the Emberton II, the best speaker in our roundup last year).

This year our attention was captured by Marshall’s Motif II ANC true wireless earbuds, which in shape and size are very similar to Apple’s AirPods Pro, except they’re all decked out in black, the Darth Vader to Apple’s Stormtrooper.

The Apple-pioneered stem design has found its way into lots of other companies’ offerings, which testifies to how the design, despite looking clunky, manages to stay firmly lodged in your ears, through some kind of ergonomic alchemy, during most basic activities. The stem also makes for a nice place to grab onto them, which, if you’re a big-handed person on a cold day, can make smaller, rounder earbuds a pain in the ear.

The Motif II ANCs, however, one-up Apple by adding textured plastic on their stems (with an attractive gold touch on the tip), which makes them even more grippable and seems to help hold them in place while you’re wearing them—something our testers universally appreciated. On the outside of each earbud is a touch control that allows you to pause, skip tracks, turn on active noise cancellation (ANC), and employ Spotify Tap, which lets subscribers play from the music service without opening their phone.

As for the ANC in its name, while their noise canceling is not as robust as Apple’s, Marshall’s earbuds did a pretty good job of blocking out wind while running and loud talkers in cafés (though no amount of ANC would be enough to cope with Keith Moon). They also have IPX5 ingress protection, meaning they’re not rated for their ability to keep out dust and solids but will do fine with heavy rain, sweat, or sea spray. One tester found that they needed occasional fit adjustment during runs, though it’s worth noting that they weigh less than the AirPods Pro—at 4.3 grams per bud, compared with Apple’s 5.3 grams.

But design isn’t what made these our favorites. Listening to our favorite tracks on the Motif II ANC was a consistently pleasant experience. Where some brands use artificial bass boosting or other gimmicks to make it feel like you’re at a rave at 4 a.m., these delivered clear, faithful highs, mids, and lows—producing more of a sense of sitting inside a sealed-off recording studio, hearing every note and nuance. Should bass really be important to you, that can still be achieved by downloading Marshall’s app and playing around with its equalizer. More versatile than the typical companion app, Marshall’s lets you dial in exactly the balance you like, and you can even program multiple EQ settings and then use the touch control to shift among them.

Marshall also nailed the design of the charging case. Made from 70 percent recycled plastic, the case’s textured vinyl surface evokes the classic Marshall amp stacks, and it’s built tough—we’ve dropped it and sat on it and it didn’t crack. The case gives you four charges of six hours each, in addition to the six hours of initial playing time you’ll get in the buds with ANC turned on (or nine hours without). This is about average: in line with the AirPods Pro but two to three hours less than competitors like Sony, Sennheiser, and JLabs.

The Motifs were our 2024 pick for Best All-Around earbuds, for their build quality, consistently impressive audio, everyday versatility, and sheer character. Our Gear Guide testing team spent some 35 hours with them, happily grabbing them when heading out on runs, hikes, ski tours, and cross-country travel, and they also performed admirably when making phone calls, washing the car, and tinkering in the workshop. With what one tester called the “best sound quality of all the buds in this test” and a design that made everyone take notice, they’re a prime example of the state of the art of Bluetooth earbuds today.

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Big News About the ��ϳԹ�� Podcast

jversteegh — Wed, 22 Nov 2023 10:15:46 +0000

Our founding host, Peter Frick-Wright, is returning—and we couldn’t be more excited. After taking the last four years to focus on short-run podcast series like Missed Fortune, , and , Peter will be back starting with our November 29 episode. Together with his creative partner, Robbie Carver, Peter will be bringing a diverse cast of talented journalists and storytellers to the ��ϳԹ�� Podcast. Our best is yet to come.

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Nick Offerman’s Flatulent ��ϳԹ��

jversteegh — Mon, 19 Dec 2022 10:30:29 +0000

This is The Offerman Files, where actor, humorist, , and Nick Offerman shares tales of wild creatures, gassy adventures, and hitting his brother in the face with a fish.

It was around 3 a.m., and you could’ve heard a pin drop—or, more to the point, a stalactite drip. We had been floating in the cave on a wooden raft for six or seven hours when I solemnly chose to accept the challenge: $50 if I could fart on pitch, specifically the G above middle C. This jocund wager was put forth by one of my fellow actors, Cristin Milioti (star of stage and screen, particularly known for her killer pipes as a singer), who clearly was more than ready for this tedious working “day” to end. Initially, she’d offered me $500, but quickly retreated to one-tenth of that amount when she registered the lack of hesitation and the stone-cold élan with which I’d agreed.

When I first learned that , the Peacock series I was working on, would be filming scenes in a cenote in the Dominican Republic, I said, “Hell yes!”—and then immediately cracked the ol’ dictionary app to look up what a cenote was. “Cenote (suh-noh-tee): A deep natural well or sinkhole, especially in Central America, formed by the collapse of surface limestone that exposes groundwater underneath.” Like I said, hell to the yes. After consuming many titillating photos online, I flew to the Caribbean robustly juiced with anticipation to experience this magical geological anomaly.

As we all know, the promised good times ahead often don’t turn out to be all that good. Or, more accurately, the highlights are rarely what we expect they’ll be. Before I knew it, I was schlepping down hundreds of dangerously slick, uneven stone steps into a cave system that was for sure spectacular. It had an otherworldly quality, kind of like we were spelunking into the digestive tract of an enormous rock giant. But I didn’t have much opportunity to enjoy the scenery, because I was focused on performing my role. Also, I was wearing extremely heavy makeup so that I appeared old, plus a wig. By the time I’d completed my descent and was “on set,” I was sopped with sweat. And I had an easy job compared with the crew, who had carried down the equipment and supplies.

The work was grueling for all of us, and came with a certain amount of forced tedium that can inspire horseplay. When we find ourselves stuck in such circumstances, left literally to our own devices, that’s precisely what happens. Tucked beneath a sheltering pine in a downpour? Sequestered in a lodge without a deck of cards? If you don’t count a skilled beatboxer among your number, then you, too, might turn to the original streaming service of making fart noises with your mouth, hands, armpits, elbows, or—if you have the talent—your actual flatulator.

It’s funny how an adventurous life teaches us this lesson time and again. We travel thousands of miles to experience the glory of nature, only for our dreams to be dashed by random factors: the weather, our fellow tourists, our upset stomachs, an insect. Whatever the thing we’re excited about—the summit, the powder run, the cenote—there’s a strong chance it will be a tad underwhelming, if not a complete bomb. Usually it doesn’t matter. If you’re lucky enough to have quality companions, you often find that the best moments arrive when you least expect them.

Something majestic about human nature allows us to delight in the stupid diversions we come up with when we get saddled with a bout of waiting.

When I was a kid in Illinois, our family had a ramshackle fishing cabin known simply as “the cabin.” My favorite memories have nothing to do with fish or bears or the woods. Instead, I remember staying up for hours with my siblings and cousins doing funny voices, paralyzed with laughter at the stupidest bits. Lying awake in the dark when you’re supposed to be asleep, especially if other humorless people (parents) are trying to sleep nearby, can be an intoxicating circumstance for foolish humor. It’s like trying not to laugh at a fart in church, when the atmosphere of reverence and the fear of mortal punishment makes the temptation that much more urgent. Suddenly, church is no longer a bore.

The same rules apply on an overnight film shoot at a subterranean lake in the Dominican Republic. Something majestic about human nature allows us not only to survive tedium and stave off boredom, but to delight in the stupid diversions we come up with when we get saddled with a bout of waiting.

In our raft, there was just one problem: Cristin might have a golden ear, but how were the rest of us to judge whether the pitch I’d attempt to produce was the right one? This was easy, as it turned out: , a tuning app on my phone. One of its functions is to play out a selected tone as if you’d just plucked a string on your guitar. I tapped the G, and—tingggg … tingggg … �پ��Բ��—a high clarion sound rang out in the cave. This was quickly followed by exhausted giggles and titters from Cristin and the two other actors on our raft, William Jackson Harper and Luis Gerardo Méndez. I tapped it again—�پ��Բ��—and as the tone hung in the air, they waited for me to match it with a tunesome whine from my nether-trumpet.

And so I did, though not until my third try. It was unmistakably on pitch, with a slight tremolo.

“Holy shit, that was it!” exclaimed Will, and we all agreed, laughing and shaking our heads in disbelief, relieved that the contest had drawn to a triumphant close. I had some inexplicable need to legitimize this feat, and I rather hounded Cristin to Venmo me the $50. She did, and I felt darkly victorious, proud, and filthy at the same time, as though, like Cool Hand Luke, I had eaten 50 eggs in an hour.

PS: The next day, I awoke with a tinge of that benign shame that can follow a night of revelry in which you know you took things too far. You removed one garment too many, perhaps, or were a little too demonstrative with the pelvis on the dance floor. My light chagrin was assuaged when I opted to donate my winnings to the GI Research Foundation, and to this day my pride at my feat remains. It’s evident in my answer every time someone hears of my victorious, late-night, subterranean flourish and asks, “How did you do that?”

“I’m classically trained.”

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Cameras, Speakers, and Headlamps, Oh My!

jversteegh — Thu, 10 Nov 2022 08:00:19 +0000

Jackery Solar 1500 Generator ($2,699)

(Photo: Courtesy Jackery)

Looking for a long-running generator that can power most appliances, including a blender or a computer—but loathe the obnoxious growl of a combustion engine in the wilderness? The Jackery Solar 1500 generator pairs a portable power station with four powerful solar panels to deliver a staggering 1,534 watt-hours. Translation: you can keep an entire household running for weeks if you have to.

Nebula Cosmos Laser 4K Projector ($2,200)

(Photo: Courtesy Nebula)

Powerful lasers allow this lunch-box-size 4K projector to produce crisp, detailed images at a wildly bright 2,400 ISO lumens. That means you can watch a movie outside during the daytime. It also delivers near theater-quality sound through dual ten-watt speakers and dual five-watt tweeters.

Sonos Roam Wireless Speaker ($179)

(Photo: Courtesy Sonos)

Sonos is known for incredible sound in a sleek package, but we were more than a little impressed with the quality and volume of this Coke-bottle-size speaker (which weighs less than a pound)—from crooning highs to powerful bass drops. It’s waterproof, dustproof, and designed with internal shock absorption, so we felt safe taking it rafting down the Rogue River.

MoMA Design Store TEAC TN-400BTSEWA Bluetooth Turntable ($550)

(Photo: Courtesy MoMA Design Store)

Lo-fi, meet high-tech: this turntable connects to any Bluetooth-compatible speaker, so you can listen wirelessly to your parents’ vinyl collection. Regardless of what speakers they prefer, the audiophiles in your life will rejoice at the precise tracking produced by the low-torque DC motor and the S-shaped tone arm.

Sponsor Content
Skydio 2+ ($1,099)

Capture all of life’s expeditions like never before with the Skydio 2+. As the only drone designed from the ground up to be self-flying, it’s your ticket to the perfect action shot. Skydio’s AI technology will follow your lead to deliver breathtaking drone footage while seamlessly avoiding any obstacles in its path. All while leaving your hands free to adventure safely and create like no one else.

Insta360 X3 Camera ($450)

(Photo: Courtesy Insta360)

Insta360 built on the significant feature set from the brand’s One X2 by adding a sensor and massive 2.3-inch touchscreen. It can shoot at 5.7K in 360-degree mode and lets you edit footage in the field. An “invisible” selfie stick (meaning it won’t show up in the frame) and stabilizing technology guarantee you won’t miss a moment of your wildest backcountry days.

Knog Quokka Run 150 Headlamp ($35)

(Photo: Courtesy Knog)

This USB rechargeable headlamp boasts a Translucent silicone strap with a red-halo effect for improved visibility from all angles. On top of winning you cool points, those features elevate this four-mode, 150-lumen headlamp into an incredibly visible tool for night running.

Pale Blue USB-C AA and AAA Rechargeable Smart Batteries ($30/each pack of 4)

(Photo: Courtesy Pale Blue)

Rechargeable batteries are not new, but we are losing our minds over these from Pale Blue. They’re incredibly easy to use and reliable. Each one plugs into a USB-C cord (no pesky specialized charging station) and has a built-in LED light that lets you know how much juice they have. They have a lifespan akin to 1,000 traditional batteries and charge five times faster—just two hours.

HigherDose Infrared Sauna Blanket ($599)

(Photo: Courtesy HigherDose)

Do you know someone who is obsessed with the benefits of using a sauna but lives in a place too small to ever build a full-sized one? This 420-watt, 5-amp, sleeping bag-shaped blanket will deliver them the same benefits that a cedar addition to their house would at approximately 1/20th of the price.

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To Hear This Horror Story, You Have to Walk Through a Forest in Sweden

lwhelan — Mon, 31 Oct 2022 16:30:50 +0000

I am not a horror fan. When I’m settled around a campfire and someone asks, “Do you want to hear a ghost story?” I respond with a hearty, “Nope!” I am, however, a fan of audio—I work as a podcast producer—and I’m a sucker for a good gimmick. So when I learned about a horror story that can only be heard in Sweden’s forests, I was immediately smitten. I hopped a plane to Stockholm shortly after and headed to the woods to scare myself silly.

The mysterious piece of fiction, called Kiln, is written by , Sweden’s answer to Stephen King. He’s written over 20 books, including , a vampire novel and his best known work in the U.S. You can’t pick Kiln up at a bookstore or even a library, however. Instead, it’s an audio story you stream on your phone that has been geo-locked within Sweden’s borders, forcing fans to quite literally follow him into the darkness of his country’s forests. For Halloween weekend, however, it’s been unlocked and for anyone who wants a taste.

After arriving in Stockholm, I headed to the woods of Västmanland, a region about a two hour drive from Stockholm. While you can technically listen to Kiln anywhere in Sweden, you could also watch The Shining on your phone in the yogurt aisle of the grocery store, but you wouldn’t, would you? So I opted to follow recommended listening practices and found a good forest to walk through. Thanks to Sweden’s freedom-to-roam laws, you can walk in any woods in the country. I opted for one near the, a bed and breakfast in Västmanland. I was alone when I walked into the quiet woods, armed with headphones and a link to Lindqvist’s story. I have been in the woods many times, but it’s never felt quite so lonely.

Creeping myself out in the forest was exactly what Lindqvist was hoping his story would facilitate. The project began when Visit Sweden, the country’s tourism board, asked Lindqvist to write a story that would help encourage visitors to leave the urban centers and go into the woods. They created , as well as to visit throughout the country to listen to it.

Tourists in Sweden tend to crowd Stockholm’s coffee shops or or head to Malmö to explore its eclectic restaurants, but the country is covered in trees, and its forests are very much part of Sweden’s national ethos.

The forest in the Västmanland region of Sweden where the author listened to ‘Kiln’ (Photo: Courtesy Melissa Locker)

“You haven’t really visited Sweden if you don’t see our forests,” says Lindqvist. “They are a part of the Swedish identity.” Tree-filled stretches like Västmanland lie right outside of Stockholm, and the lake-filled district of Värmlandand Lapland spreads to the northernmost reaches of the continent, waiting for outdoor enthusiasts to explore.

It’s not only the woods that Swedes love—the paranormal is built into their lives as well. Fairy tale creatures like trolls, elves, huldra, and Näcken are as much woodland creatures as moose and bears. “The supernatural has always played an active role in Swedish culture,” Lindqvist says. “It is more than just a backdrop to the crime stories and Nordic noir movies that have made the country famous.”

When Lindqvist was a child, he had a healthy fear of the woods and those that live in it. “The creatures that scared me as a child were big locusts, especially the kind that have a sort of neck. They can slowly tilt their heads and look at you. What are they thinking?” he asks. The forest was a sinister place to him, the perfect setting not for kidnapping or physical harm, but something worse—“ceasing to exist.”

“The supernatural has always played an active role in Swedish culture,” Lindqvist says.

As I walked through the forest, I began to see why Lindqvist found the woods to be such an unsettling place. The forest in Sweden is not like the wet, piney forests I know in the Pacific Northwest or the crisp deciduous woods of the Northeast. The woods in Vastmanland are moss lined. Every step you take your foot sinks down a few inches like the ground is preparing to envelop you. Worse, each step disappears, the moss springing back up to leave no trace of the path you took. As I trek through the woods, I note the lingonberry and blueberry bushes, taking a rough inventory of foraging options, you know, just in case my trip goes longer than expected.

Before it gets too dark—I’m truly not brave enough to listen to a ghost story in the dark in unknown woods)—I find a misplaced boulder to use as a back rest, and settle onto the soft mossy ground. Then I put on my headphones and brace myself.

No spoilers, naturally, but the experience terrifying and wonderful and worth the trip. Kiln follows an unnamed visitor to Sweden (a tourist just like you!) who enters an unidentified patch of woods and emerges haunted by his experiences.

“Nature seems to come alive and lures you to come after it,” Lindqvist told Visit Sweden after being tasked with the story. It’s a tale that travels with you, or to crib the title of a horror movie I didn’t watch, it follows. You leave the woods, but the story stays in the back of your mind, even as you follow a path out of the trees, head back to the warmth of a bonfire, and travel home on the plane. The story wants you to come back to the woods. If you dare.

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Everything Our Editors Loved in June

dbyck — Wed, 06 Jul 2022 11:00:24 +0000

��ܳٲ��editors spent June checking books off their summer reading lists, from novels in the Star Wars universe to emotive poetry compilations. Here are the movies, books, music, and more that we enjoyed last month.

What We Read

Last month I reread Chinua Achebe’s classic novel . I hadn’t read it since college, decades ago, but remembered its theme of a man trying to hold on to what he had built in life as the world changed around him, which feels appropriate now. What struck me this time was how much of the work is dedicated to describing, in sparse, evocative prose, the culture of the Igbo people and the life that the hero, Okonkwo, creates for himself before the inevitable unraveling. When the fall comes, things go south fast before the tragic conclusion. I felt the same disgust as I did initially about those forcing their culture on others without understanding the ramifications of their actions, but also gained a new appreciation of how temporary our efforts are in light of the short arc of a life and the certainty of change, which doesn’t lessen their value. —Jonathan Beverly, senior running editor

The best thing I read in June was Courtney Bush’s poetry collection , which is being published in a limited run by Newest York. It’s brilliant, funny, and accessible, even if you don’t typically read a lot of poetry. Reverent and attentive, delightfully unserious and dead serious at the same time, Bush collects insights from preschoolers, drunk friends, songs, books, movies, and more, then madly synthesizes all of it into something you can hold. —Abigail Barronian, senior editor

What We Listened To

At the end of May, I snagged a last-minute ticket to catch Baltimore hardcore band Turnstile. It was a particularly harrowing news week, and I welcomed the opportunity for catharsis in a crowd, all of us collectively banging our heads to some thumping tunes. June brought more demoralizing headlines, so I kept turning to Turnstile’s album , ratcheting up the volume on my headphones to get lost in the mosh pit of my mind. The opening song, “Mystery,” begins with a dreamlike sequence before bursting into explosive guitar, shepherding the listener into a riotous soundscape. Tracks throb with energy, kicking out short riffs that prompt a foot tap at minimum, but don’t be surprised if that’s a gateway to full-out dancing. Even if hardcore isn’t your thing, the album has a grooviness that cuts across genre—just take it from this pop-music lover. —Daniella Byck, associate editor

What We Watched

As a Star Wars fan who grew up with the prequels, I was psyched (and a bit nervous) to watch the new TV series. The films had well-documented flaws, but Ewan McGregor’s Kenobi wasn’t one of them, and the trilogy’s world building sparked imaginations and spawned countless possibilities for other stories in the Star Wars universe. With every decision Disney makes to fill gaps in the story, some of that potential is either realized or taken away. Thankfully, the show was well worthwhile. Instant-classic Darth Vader moments more than made up for a few of the perplexing decisions in the series, and I loved the finale. To get another take on Ben Kenobi during his Tatooine desert seclusion, I concurrently read , the 2013 novel by John Jackson Miller. The book isn’t canon anymore, and it diverges slightly from the show on the Jedi’s mindset. But its scale and timeline don’t intersect with the series—it’s more like a western set in one town—so I enjoyed leaning into what I liked most about each story. For more commentary, former Binge Mode podcast cohosts Jason Concepcion () and Mallory Rubin () continue to produce fun and thoughtful podcasts that dive deep into all the episodes from a fan perspective. —Jon Ver Steegh, digital production manager

No, this isn’t some weird sci-fi film. is a 2019 documentary that follows migratory beekeepers as they bring their hives to fruit and nut farmers to pollinate crops. It delves into the mysterious decline of bee populations over the past several decades due to various mites, pesticides, and largely, as many beekeepers underline, other unknown reasons. As a beekeeper myself, I appreciated the gorgeous close-up shots of the workers taking flight and gathering pollen from flowers. And I definitely shed a tear or two when one of the men interviewed talked about losing half of his bee population in one season. Anyone who cares about our planet—or eating nuts, for that matter—should watch this film. —Abigail Wise, digital managing director

Before you shell out ten bucks to see , you should know that——it has a critics’ score of 30 percent and an audience score of 77 percent. It’s not a good movie, but it is a good time. I watched it with my family over Father’s Day weekend (as did, uh, however many people equals in ticket sales) and I only fell asleep once, during a scene toward the middle that was heavy on humans and low on dinosaurs. And that’s the thing about this movie—it very much delivers on the volume of velociraptors. Every scene goes like this: characters with names I can’t remember have to get somewhere—onto a plane, into a nefarious biolab, et cetera—but wait, there are dinosaurs chasing them. Sure, film buffs gripe that Jurassic World: Dominion is an “” and a “” full of “.” Which, like, OK, but it’s chock-full of CGI and animatronic dinosaurs. It’s worth the ten bucks. —Isabella Rosario, assistant editor

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