Hit the Slopes Hard with the Best Sports Headphones for Skiing or Snowboarding

Looking to shred some powder while jamming to your favorite tunes? Well, we’re about to show you some of the best sports headphones and audio helmets that will definitely energize your next run down the slopes.

In order to find the best headphones and audio helmets to bring to the slopes we asked as many year in, year out skiers and snowboarders as we could find. Oddly enough, most of them responded with the same answer.

Here’s what they had to say:

You have 2 options: in-ear headphones and headphones built into your helmet, don’t even bother trying neckband headphones or vertical headphones, and especially stay away from over the ear headphones. Why? Because they’ll just get in the way and end up broken.
Stick with these 3 brands for in-ear headphones: Sennheiser, Shure, or Etymotic. We were a little shocked with this response, as we don’t know that much about Etymotic.
While in-ear headphones will work fine, the better choice is to grab a helmet with built in headphones. The top picks were Giro and Smith, hands down.

What else should you look for?

If you ski with a helmet, then obviously the most important thing is to have sports headphones that fit comfortably underneath your helmet. You want the headphones to be of good enough quality that they have a slight noise cancelling effect to block out wind and other ambient sounds. However, you don’t want the best noise cancelling headphones around, then you’ll just end up not paying attention to your surroundings and hurting someone around you. Last, but not least the cord should include a volume device so you don’t have to reach into your pocket with your gloves on and try to change the volume or song.

One other thing we didn’t put much emphasis on (frankly because we hope it is obvious), your headphones should be waterproof. We know, we know, you’re a world class skier that never falls and snow won’t be anywhere near your awesome skiing headphones. But just in case.