A bold, feature-packed headset that dives deep—but doesn’t always swim straight.
The Suunto Aqua is an ambitious leap into multi-sport smart audio, bringing bone conduction tech underwater with swim tracking features that are genuinely unique—if not entirely accurate. It shines in build quality, comfort, and versatility, but falls short on delivering meaningful insights from its swim metrics and gesture controls that are more twitchy than intuitive. Sound quality is decent but doesn’t lead the pack, and, while the neck fatigue alerts and jump assessments show creative thinking, they're more novelty than necessity. In short: a solid effort, but Suunto's trying to do too much here—and nailing too little.
Pros
- Secure, reliable and comfortable to wear
- Useful power bank charger
- Some interesting onboard smarts
Cons
- Presentation of swimming data
- Lacks actionable insights on swimming technique
- There are better-sounding open-ear headphones available
The Suunto Aqua represents the brand’s latest dip into the world of earbuds—an area it’s been increasingly active in since being acquired by Liesheng in 2022.
Suunto’s first headphones, the Wing, released in 2023, featured LED lights to keep you visible at night and came with a power bank-style charger. Then came the Sonic last January, which removed those extras to focus on offering improved sound. The Aqua is Suunto’s smartest headphones yet and is firmly built for swimmers.
It’s an ambitious move to introduce swim tracking features to the head, but Suunto goes even further by providing smart functionalities for other sports on the Aqua. How well do they perform?
I’ve been wearing the Aqua both in and out of the water—this is our extended take.
Design, comfort, and controls
The Aqua closely resembles the design of Suunto’s other headphones, as well as waterproof swimming headphones from brands like Shokz, H20 Audio, and lesser-known companies such as Nank.
Its tried-and-true neckband design ensures a secure fit and incorporates materials for comfortable extended wear. Available in black or a lime/navy colorway (pictured), it blends silicone and titanium alloy to create a durable yet lightweight option.
At 35g, they are only slightly heavier than the Shokz OpenSwim Pro (27.3g); however, they are by no means heavy headphones. I’ve had no issues wearing them for workouts lasting over an hour.
The controls
Similar to Suunto’s other headphones, physical controls are located on the underside of the right arm, with a multifunction control on the outside of the left earcup. These controls let you skip tracks, play or pause audio, adjust the volume, and manage calls through the built-in microphone.
This button layout has proven effective on other neckband-style headphones, allowing easy access to buttons even during intense workouts and swimming. It’s great that you can customize controls through the same companion app to set up Suunto’s sports watches, too.
Gesture controls and waterproof rating
In addition to those physical controls, there are also gesture-based head movement controls that Suunto also offered on its first Wing headphones.
These allow you to answer calls, reject them, and skip a song by nodding or shaking your head. However, as I found with the Wing, these controls are too sensitive, meaning even the gentlest head movements can trigger them. Allowing for sensitivity adjustments would be a smart addition to enhance the controls’ usefulness.
The included charger isn’t standard; it clips to one side of the headphones and requires a USB-C cable to power them up. It also doubles as a power bank, allowing users to top up their phones and other gadgets.
While the power bank isn’t waterproof, the headphones are. The Aqua has an IP68 waterproof rating, making it suitable for water up to 5 meters deep for up to two hours.
Swim tracking and smart features
The Aqua’s biggest skill beyond streaming your audio is the promise of tracking your swimming. However, it does not focus on the metrics that most swimming watches capture; instead, it emphasizes those that help you pay closer attention to your swimming technique.
How it works
It utilizes accelerometer and gyroscope motion sensors to capture metrics, which are the same sensors found in most sports watches and smartwatches for tracking swims. Among the metrics that the Aqua can capture are stroke posture, head pitch angle, breath frequency, and glide time.
You can start tracking swims using the headphones, which will guide you through a brief calibration process that primarily involves asking you to look ahead and remain still for a few seconds. Then, it’s time to move. There isn’t any real-time feedback, so you must wait until your session is complete and the headphones are synced with the app to view your stats.
Each of these metrics offers explanations to help you better understand the data being presented and may indicate something about your technique.
For breaststroke glide time, I learned that a longer glide indicates better technique; however, there’s no way to determine if my glide time was necessarily long enough. This is where the lack of actionable, personalized insights becomes apparent. I’d like to see data presented not only to indicate whether it’s good or bad but also how to make improvements.
It’s also somewhat disappointing that it doesn’t provide those essential swimming stats, such as the number of lengths or distance. This suggests that the feature is primarily geared towards open water swimmers, who likely already possess a watch capable of tracking these core metrics.
Swim tracking data accuracy
There aren’t a lot of other swimming wearables that can offer the metrics the Aqua can, but there’s also the question of how accurate the data ctually is.
During testing, we found some overlap—like duration and time spent swimming with different strokes—but also a few suspect readings. For example, compared to the very reliable Form Smart Swim 2 Goggles, the Aqua suggested a much longer period using breaststroke and a much shorter time using freestyle.
Protect your neck
In addition to monitoring swimming techniques, the Aqua also offers features for non-swimmers. It utilizes the same motion sensors to activate a neck fatigue alert mode designed for cyclists, ensuring they move their necks to prevent stress and injury.
There’s also a neck mobility assessment that evaluates your neck health through a brief test requiring you to rotate your head in various directions. Rounding things off is a jump assessment that provides insight into your neuromuscular fatigue resulting from exercise and daily movement.
Suunto certainly can’t be accused of not trying to utilize those onboard motion sensors in new and inventive ways. The question is whether these features will be significant draws for many.
Sound quality
The Aqua delivers sound through an open-ear design by utilizing bone conduction technology. This technology employs transducers to send vibrations along the cheekbones, converting those vibrations into sound.
You have two streaming methods: Bluetooth streaming or using the music player, which offers up to 32GB (approximately 8,000 songs) of storage.
They are compatible with MP3, FLAC, WAV, M4A, APE, and WMA file formats. You can either drag and drop audio through the Suunto app or connect the headphones to the charger and plug them into a computer via USB-C to transfer audio files onto them.
Suunto features three unique sound modes. The normal mode delivers a well-rounded sound profile for different listening situations, while the outdoor mode is designed for louder environments. Lastly, the underwater mode is tailored for controlling the music player.
How the sound quality stacks up
I’ve tested Suunto’s other two bone conduction headphones along with most other sports-focused open-ear headphones, and I’d say the sound quality isn’t the best I’ve experienced.
It’s good enough, but if you seek the best in open-ear sound, there are superior options available. The standard listening mode, while fairly balanced, is slightly quieter than the outdoor mode, which offers a bit more performance but tends to sound a little tinny.
The underwater mode performed solidly for swims, and while I believe Shokz and brands like Nank provide better sound quality in the water, these headphones worked well to make listening during swims a pleasurable experience.
You can experience some of that bone conduction vibration tickle at louder volumes, and they also leak sound, which is a common issue with other bone conduction headphones.
From a connectivity perspective, I’ve had no issues pairing them with an iPhone, Android phone, and Garmin watch. There is a dual-device connection mode that allows pairing with two devices simultaneously—simply enable it first in the Suunto app.
Battery life
The Aqua’s battery life hinges on your audio listening habits and usage of onboard features. According to Suunto, you can enjoy up to 10 hours of battery life, which can be further extended by 20 hours when utilizing the full charge power bank charger.
I found that when streaming music from the onboard music player while tracking swims, a 30-minute swim caused the battery to drop by 10%. That equates to five hours of MP3 playback. With Bluetooth streaming, the battery drop for an hour of music was also 10%, so those figures seem to align.
Listening at louder volumes impacts battery life more. However, since you have that power bank handy, and they usually take less than an hour to charge fully, the battery performance aligns with other waterproof swimming headphones and Suunto’s other models.
The Suunto Aqua represents the brand’s latest dip into the world of earbuds. This is our full test and review of the swimming headphones.
