Aftershokz showed its newest version of direct bone conducting Bluetooth headphones at the 2015 International CES this week. When maintaining situational awareness is necessary, these devices allow natural sounds to travel unimpeded through your ear drums and use the alternative path of passing tiny vibrations through your cheek bones physically to your inner ear. One touch access to calling on any attached smartphone is possible along with equalization presets to maximize them to your preferences.

The new wireless version is an extremely low impact way to listen to any audio source on your smartphone while also focused on another activity. Aftershokz provides an almost natural way to monitor phone calls while on set or in other work situations where you might have to answer critical calls while remaining openly connected to the activity at hand.

The size of the transducer has been reduced from earlier wired models and the acoustic response is natural sounding. Base rolls off early and while music is surprisingly good, phone calls are very well supported along with alert sounds.

Equipped with one mic for voice and a second to suppress background noise, this might be the perfect work headset that keeps you in the real moment both by allowing monitoring of electronic communications and still interacting with your colleagues in the physical space at the same time.