I personally find those over ear hearing protection uncomfortable and sweaty, especially trying to wear them for a full shift but I have tried that method in the past.

I can't say I have any experience with ear buds as they have never fit my ears well so even before bone conduction I would gravitate more towards headphones that hooked onto my ears or more often than not just closed back headphones. That being said I know that you would be sacrificing bass primarily in terms of audio quality when comparing the two.

The bone conduction does give you a weird sensation of bass in the way they vibrate against the side of your head but it is no substitute for actual bass, so your main sacrifice in the comparison will always be audio quality. That being said all the points I said outweigh the loss in quality for me.

I can wear these for a whole day and they are never uncomfortable like I would get with any other headphones. On top of that they excel at audiobooks which is what probably 70% of my listening is. The tech was originally developed for military comms so as to keep the ears open to surrounding noises and as such they were designed to be used for speech initially.

The sensation is a bit different to regular headphones too. Regular headphones are using your ear drum like you would usually where as bone conduction is vibrating through your bones directly to the three little bones in your ear that you use to hear, bypassing the ear drum entirely. Because of this it sounds like the audio is coming more from the center of your head rather than from outside of it as it would with regulars. In combination with in ear ear defence I can block out outside noise so well that you don't need the bone conduction up loud it just feels like the audio is comfortably coming from inside my head in a weird way.

On top of all of that it is no where near as fatiguing to listen to things for extended periods of time like if you use regular ones, regardless of how loud you have them.

Ultimately it is a different experience and particularly for audiobooks they absolutely excel. I was skeptical at first and it took me nearly 2 years of reading about then and questioning if they would even work before I bit the bullet. Since I first got them though they barely ever left my head and I use then for nearly everything, and I'm a guy who use to carry around closed back headphones with an external amplifier and everything but these just win in so many other respects for day to day use.

Bone conduction headphones don't touch your ears directly. They transmit sound vibrations through your skull, so it sounds like the music is inside your head. It also leaves your ears open to hearing outside sounds normally instead of muted.. There's no noise cancellation, but it allows you to use earplugs or other ear protection and still have music.