I doubt anyone remembers that I wrote about listening to audiobooks overnight to avoid nightmares. Turns out that what I thought was a peculiar thing for myself to do, some sixteen years ago, is quite common — although podcasts are often used in place of audiobooks, as I found out by the number of people who admitted to listening to No Such Thing As A Fish during their tour shows — I almost always go and watch a show from their tour when they have one, and I have heard that same confession from a number of different people.
Given this is a lot more common than I thought, I wasn’t surprised that there are a number of solutions that are specifically targeted at providing solutions to listen to stuff while sleeping. Which is good, because most generic solutions don’t really end up working out.
My personal journey through this has been mostly affected by who I was around — when living in Italy at my mother’s place I obviously had to use something that wouldn’t play out loud, so I went to earbuds early on — including the disappointingly fragile Shure earbuds. I have actually continued doing so when I moved to Dublin and lived alone, although given my experience with expensive earplugs, I switched to cheap Sony sports earphones which I could easily buy at Tesco or Spar if I tore a wire out (it might have happened once or twice.)
Eventually I switched to Bluetooth speakers, since I lived alone, and from there I went to a Google Home Max up roughly until my now-wife moved in. And since then I have mostly used my Bose noise-cancelling headphones over the past few years, in particular the spare pair that I didn’t keep in my commuting bag. Unfortunately Bose appeared to suffer from the high interest rate environment at some point last year, and it was impossible for me to find an original pair of earpads, so I ended up replacing my commute earphones with Sony WH-1000XM5, and moved the QuietComfort SE to my nightstand.
And that’s when my friend Alex recommended me to look into the Ozlo Sleepbuds, which were out of stock at the time. As I said, there are now tons of products aimed at people who listen to music, or relaxing sounds, to sleep better — I also got a different product that combines (not noise-cancelling) headphones with a sleep mask, and Anker (yes, the battery company), even makes their own sleep-optimized buds. But the selling point of the Sleepbuds appears to be their ability to work both with and without a phone, since the sleep sounds are coming from the buds case itself — and together with the ability to stop Bluetooth playback and switch over to neutral sounds based on whether it thinks you fell asleep, it is meant to significantly improve on your quality of sleep — but that’s the marketing copy, isn’t it?
So how well do these buds work? I’d say quite well! There’s plenty of different options to adapt on anyone’s ears, and even for me as a side sleeper, they feel almost like they’re not there. Their sound-isolation is decent: you can still sort-of talk with your significant other while you have them on, but you won’t be hearing them when playing something.
I’m not particularly worried about being able to run the sound without a Bluetooth connection — as it turns out, I have a much more important use for my phone overnight, so I rarely am asleep without a phone charged and with working Bluetooth. But it does work as intended, though of all the pre-loaded sleep sounds,t he one I’m finding the most useful is the “red noise” that they default to.
Side note here: I do find it oh-so-annoying for phone manufacturers doing full software update overnight, because these conflict badly with my relying on the phone for critical information such as my glucometer. My work phone forces updates to go through overnight, it’s so much of a pain when oncall, that I charge the phone during the day, and leave it unplugged overnight. It is frustrating!
In terms of sound quality, I don’t think I’d listen to music with them, but it is more than reasonable to listen to audiobooks and podasts. The sleep detection is… reasonable — a couple of times it appears to have decided I was already asleep even though I was still awake enough to hear the switch between the book and the noise. It also automatically switches to the noise if the phone stops playing anything — say because Play Store decided to update Audible, and that closed the app altogether.
The one thing that I do find annoying, though understandable, is battery life. To be tiny and comfortable, the sleepbuds have very tiny batteries, with an estimated battery life of roughly ten hours. This should be enough for a perfect good night’s sleep, and honestly it’s rare for me to get any close to that sleep even during weekends and holidays. But it also means you have to be absolutely sure you have charged your buds before you use them.
Like pretty much every single Bluetooth earbuds pair in the last ten or more years, the charging happens through the buds’ case, via USB-C (I don’t think it uses Power Delivery, but who knows), but unlike, say, Apple’s AirPods, that slide down into the case and thus always have a positive connection between them, the sleepbuds are laying flat in their case, with the charging alignment being provided through some strong magnets. Unfortunately the magnets are not strong enough to force the buds to always align with the charge ports when you bring them inside the case, but they are strong enough to trick you into thinking you placed them to charge when you just dropped them into the case. You bet that on the third night after I received the sleepbuds, I had one of the two completely out of charge. Since then I make sure to pay attention to the light that “confirms receipt” of the bud when I take them off in the morning. I’m sure one day I’ll be woken up by the pager, and not remember to be that careful, and find myself in the evening with out-of-charge sleepbuds — but that day hasn’t happened yet.
Speaking of being woken up — I have yet to test whether I get good notifications for pages coming from work, so for now I decided not to wear the sleepbuds while oncall, but at least the built-in alarm works quite nicely, and it’s not a sudden jump that jumps my heart rate for the rest of the day. I’m very tempted to use it, but since it runs on the buds themselves, it ends up waking up me and not my wife, the shared Alexa alarm works better in that regard.
So I’d say up to this point, I’m quite happy with the sleepbuds and they seem to have improved my sleep quite significantly since I started using them. The Ozlo website also says that there’s a “sleep tracking” feature coming soon, but it wasn’t in the list of reasons for me to get the sleepbuds, so the fact that this is not available has had no input in my decisions.
