It has been a while since we heard from our friends at Maxell, and they have just made the Vibrabone HP-VBC40 earbuds.

The earbuds are essentially “a hybrid of standard speaker drivers and vibration-based bone conduction drivers which serve to give your tunes a bit of an extra kick”. For those of you who don’t know what bone conduction is, it is a way of transmitting sound through the bone rather than through the ear.

This is important for the Vibraphone HP-VBC40, because most earbuds or headphones tend to increase bass by increasing the size of the drivers. With bone conduction, this saves the ears from being bombarded with sound that could harm them. It also has an inline volume control.

The Vibraphone HP-VBC40 earbuds are available in black, white, and blue. Unfortunately, I don’t have a price on these guys, but I seem to have a release date of about April 25th.