Cheap wireless OFF-EAR headphones / headset?

[MartinH.]

I'm looking for a cheap wireless OFF-EAR headset. With "off-ear" I mean it shouldn't touch my ears at all, just be close to them. Kind of like this, but with a regular headstrap and a mic:

Index's 'Off-ear' Headphones Are Its Most Surprising Innovation

Valve finally revealed their new Index headset and it’s got some pretty impressive specs. From improved resolution and field of view to a display which can run up to 144Hz, there’s a lot to like. But one of the headset’s most surprising innovations is its headphones. I love seeing ‘stupid...

www.roadtovr.com

What I'm looking for probably doesn't exist... But I thought if it does, someone here might be able to point me the right way.

This would mainly be used for gaming and voicechat. I care about analog volume control, comfortable fit, bluetooth range, and battery life. But I'm not very picky on sound quality - comfort is waaay more important to me in this case. Optional cable-bound mode would be a nice bonus, in case bluetooth doesn't work out as well as I'd hoped. And PS5 compatibility would be cool (don't have one yet, but I'm planning to buy one).


Since it probably doesn't exist, I'm open to DIY suggestions. I think I have an old Koss Porta Pro somewhere that maybe I could mod into something closer to what I'm looking for.

 

[BassClef]

That is an interesting design but can not see how it would produce a reasonably flat FULL frequency response, especially on the low end. I seriously doubt that 40 Hz resonse on the bottom. And there are a great cans that are extremely comfortable. Is bluetooth a must?

 

[MartinH.]

That is an interesting design but can not see how it would produce a reasonably flat FULL frequency response, especially on the low end. I seriously doubt that 40 Hz resonse on the bottom. And there are a great cans that are extremely comfortable. Is bluetooth a must?

I only need this for gaming, netflix, discord, and stuff like that, I really don't care whether the frequency response is good. I just need it to not hurt my ears, not interfere with a discord call during gaming, and be wireless and precisely adjustable in volume.

I have a cable bound headset that is very comfortable but after wearing it long enough it still hurts and during summer every over ear headset is just way too warm on my ears.

My PC has 4 screens connected to it, one is mounted to my bed with an ergotron monitor arm. But when I want to play an FPS there, I don't get any positional audio information anymore from the speakers, because I'm sitting too far away and off center. My regular headphones don't have a long enough cable, and a long enough cable extension is too many other kinds of hassle (I tried). When watching Netflix at night I always worry about it being too loud for the neighbors, and when I turn it down enough I can no longer understand the dialog in all the shitty modern audio mixes. Same problem in most games.

I tried buying a usb headphone with very long cable and using a USB extension cable on top of it, but it turned out - aside from being uncomfortable - that thing must have been engineered by half-deaf people because the digital volume goes in steps like: total silence, too loud, way too loud, deafening 1, deafening 2, deafening 3, [...] , 100%. And when you plug it in, it always defaults to something ridiculously loud. Which is why I want analog volume control. I simply assume everything that switches digitally in steps is too loud or imprecise for me.


A while ago I was looking into retro-fitting cable bound headphones with bluetooth and it is possible apparently. I was planning to just get another one of my fairly comfortable gaming headphones, but iirc those solutions didn't support also transmitting the microphone, and it wouldn't solve the issue of them being too warm. Since I've been using them fairly frequently again these last 2 months I've been getting the ocasional short sharp pain in one ears. Since that increased headphone use is the only ear-related change that I can think of, I believe it's causal and I think it's caused from the moisture buildup from wearing warm over ear headphones. I hope that headphones that don't touch my ears, like the ones on VR headsets, would solve all my problems. I'm willing to take a fairly bad sound as a tradeoff.