SleepPhones Let You Listen to Music While You Sleep

Some folks sleep better to music. White noise is a proven benefit to many sleepers, giving your mind something to focus on that doesn’t require any real energy to focus, making it easier to drift to sleep, meditate, or otherwise relax. This is the case with me, and if you’re reading this, potentially for you as well.

Sleeping alone means being able to blast the radio at all hours of the night, filling your room with whatever white noise you prefer. However, if you sleep next to someone or share a dorm room, you’re probably not going to get away with having the radio blaring sounds of the ocean or your favorite band in the middle of the night.

Enter SleepPhones, a comfortable headband that you wear to bed, allowing you to hear music, relaxing tones, or even hypnosis tapes while you sleep. Here is a look at this device, and how it may (or may not) be the best option for you.

Design

SleepPhones are made from recycled fleece, a comfortable material used for everything from hoodies to pajamas, giving you warmth and comfort in a breathable material.

Inside the headband sit two small, flat speakers in felt sleeves and a Y split — also in a sleeve. The speakers are flat enough to be practically unnoticeable as you wear them, even if you’re a side sleeper.

The cord runs out of a small Velcro opening in the back of the headband, allowing you to run the cable under the pillow and to your phone or mp3 player on the nightstand. Anything with a 3.5mm stereo headphone jack will work, though. I coupled mine with an iPod nano.

I was surprised at how comfortable the unit was. Slipping it on, even with my big head, was easy and I didn’t feel as though the stretchy material was compressing my head or anything. After a few moments, I could hardly feel it at all.

SleepPhones come in several different colors: midnight black, quiet lavender, and soft gray. Though they hardly make a fashionable accessory, it’s nice to know you have some options.

Cleaning the SleepPhones is easy. Just remove the cables and speakers from the unit and throw the headband in the wash.

Sound Quality

In order to hear sound out of the SleepPhones properly, you need to position the internal speakers just right. This may require some pushing and pulling inside the sleeve, though it’s not that difficult to do. During the night, one speaker would inevitably fall out-of-place and I’d hear most of my audio through one ear and not the other.

The sound quality is actually not bad at all. While the headphones don’t get too loud (they’re designed for sleepers) they do reproduce excellent sound, even through the fleece headband.

For my first night of testing, I decided to go with a rain track that is supposed to sound as though you’re inside a tent during a thunderstorm. To my surprise, that’s exactly how it felt when I closed my eyes.

Price

SleepPhones are available for about $40, and can come as part of a package deal that includes binaural sleeping music and a stuffed sheep for your mp3 player for a bit more.

If you sleep with someone who snores, or in an environment where white noise is prohibited, you may find these to be the perfect solution, well worth the price of admission.

As for me, I believe this may be exactly what I’ve been searching for, and will continue to use them for some time to come.