The Duo™ is an MP3 player designed for swimmers that offers the highest quality sound without the use of ear buds. The Duo™ utilizes a sleek, two-piece design and Bone Conduction audio transmission to deliver crystal clear audio through cheekbones to the inner ear. An integrated clip design secures the Duo™ to goggle straps to rest on the cheekbones for a comfortable and streamlined fit. A simplified interface offers four buttons to easily navigate between songs, podcasts, audiobooks and other supported audio files. The Duo™ supports unprotected MP3 and WMA files. The included USB magnetic dock allows for universal data transfers and charging. The device offers 4GB of flash memory and a Lithium-Ion rechargeable battery life of up to 7 hours.
- Bone conduction audio transmission creates amazingly clear sound in the water without the use of ear-buds
- Tested to perform at a depth of 3 meters (10 feet) for 30 minutes. If immersion at 3 meters (10 feet), or deeper, occurs for longer than 30 minutes, damage may occur
- Integrated clip design secures the device to goggle straps to rest on the cheekbones for a comfortable and streamlined fit
- Rechargeable lithium-ion battery with up to 7 hours of battery life
- Stores approximately 1000 songs or 60 hours of playback
Just –
Swimming laps to music is wonderful. The sound is clear. Has doubled my swimming time as I lose myself in the music. It’s easy to download the music onto this player. Two things to know that’s not in the enclosed instructions: 1. You are to charge the battery 24 hours before your first use. 2. Before putting on the player, turn it on until you see the green light. Then wait 10 seconds for the music to turn on. Initially I would turn it on over and over and over as I never heard anything. I finally called Finis, and was told there was a lag time of 10 seconds before the music would play. I suggested this be included in their directions. Now that I know how to operate this player, it’s fantastic.
Just –
Took my new headphones out for a spin in the pool. They’re a revelation in terms of great sound that doesn’t disappear when water gets in your ears like with in-ear headphones. Also they stay put even when you push off hard from the wall. I’ve never found an in-ear waterproof headset that didn’t constantly fall out and also produce water-logged, muffled sound ten minutes into my swim. So I give the headphone design and sound quality an A+! Slight caveat: the sound noticeably changes as your head bobs in and out of the water while swimming (I do mostly breast stroke), which gets annoying. However I think this problem will largely be ameliorated by using silicone ear plugs.
The player is a different story. If your whole music collection is in iTunes as mine is, you will have to laboriously convert each file you want to transfer to mp3. This will end up creating a duplicate file in iTunes that you will subsequently have to manually delete in order to prevent the song playing twice next time you go to listen to the album it’s on. Furthermore, older iTunes music is in a protected format that can’t be converted without either going through the ridiculously labor intensive process of burning to a CD then re-ripping, finding a conversion app that actually works, or splashing out on iTunes Match. Or just buying the music again. Any way you slice it, you are spending a lot of time and/or money to downgrade your music to an old school file format just to get it on this device.
Then, to add insult to injury, the included software doesn’t let you order the tracks by album or playlist, and even if you could there’s no way to choose what you want to listen to from the device itself once you’re in the pool apart from the very fiddly forward/reverse buttons. I like listening to specific playlists in specific orders for my workouts. Knowing which song I’m on and how many are left helps me time myself without having to stop to look at a clock. This player doesn’t give a functional way to accomplish that unless you only load the specific playlist you want for the day and go through the trouble of changing the track names to numbers so it will reliably play in the right order. That’s too much extra work every time I want to go for a quick swim. I want an interface where I can fill this thing to capacity in one sitting with a variety of different playlists and then be able to choose which one I want from the device itself while in the pool. That’s a pretty simple ask with today’s technology, and I don’t understand why they paired such sophisticated headphones with such a bare bones player.
So A+ for the headphones, D- for the player. Fingers crossed they will come out with an upgraded player to go with these excellent headphones
Just –
I used a previous generation finis – after a couple years the thing finally quit working and I’ve missed it. As a daily swimmer, the thought of having decent audio to shorten the laps a bit has always been a dream. The bone conduction method that the finis uses works surprisingly well.
The current device suffers from an inexplicable button configuration – it’s next to impossible to simply press a button and get going. That’s my biggest gripe honestly. You put one of these things in the hands of the apple design team and you would really have something. They have stiffened up the connecting cord which was the element that failed on my last one – maybe this one would last.
The reason I don’t and won’t know if it would last is that I bit the bullet and paid the crazy restocking fee is how it made my head feel after swimming. After only 45 minutes in the water, when I got out of the pool my whole head felt fuzzy. Sort of like a mild hangover…not pleasant. I thought the first time that it was a fluke and tried it a couple more times. Same thing. Swam without it, no issues. I would shake it off and just keep using it to have the music but, after using the last one consistently for a couple years, I had a little spot of skin cancer right where the device sits against your cheek. I thought it was the sun and maybe it was, but right in front of your ear is a weird place to get skin cancer.
Of course I can’t say that the finis device was the cause but you won’t have a study that tells you their device is dangerous. I can tell you that when I realized my head was feeling different I was out and I’m not looking back. I had to share this story in the hopes I can save one or two people my issues. For those of you that take the plunge best of luck. It does have great sound.
Just –
This is a really solid upgrade from the Neptune and a great way to pass the laps.
After owning a Neptune for several years swimming without music is torture the few times I forget to charge before practice.
Pros:
1. Got rid of that stupid screen on the back of your head (who needs a screen on the back of their head???)
2. I was very skeptical of the new goggle clips but they actually work very well once you get them figured out, much harder to remove / attach than the Neptune’s clips but like most others I just ended up leaving them attached to my goggles permanently.
3. Great sound quality and durability (I’ve had mine for about a year with zero issues (finally broke at the joint between the wire and an earpiece after ~2 years).
Cons:
1. You still press the button closest to the back of your head to skip to the next song while you hold the button closest to your face to increase the volume, seems really backwards to me but not a big deal at all once you get used to it.
2. Why god WHY don’t these have Bluetooth, how does that not make sense?
3. The wire between the “pods” is very long for what I need but I understand you need to fit a variety of heads and it’s better to have too much than not enough