Apparently they won’t suck the audio department
Sir James Dyson. Designer. Inventor. Billionaire. You’ve probably seen his name on vacuum cleaners, bladeless fans, bathroom hand dryers, and other over-engineered multi-purpose products with outrageously high price tags. And now you can add wireless headphones with active noise canceling and air filtering to the list.
First announced at the end of March, the Dyson Zone appears to be designed for wealthy digital audiophiles with air allergies.
To be sure, you’re getting a lot of headphones for the money: eight microphones join the active noise-cancellation system to reduce ambient ambience by a whopping 38dB. Distortion is touted as extremely low (0.08% at 1 kHz, 94 dB) with wider-than-average frequency reproduction from 6 Hz to 21 kHz and there’s a special EQ profile that “optimizes the frequency curve for clear, clean audio”, whatever that means to a segment of the niche audience that may have already made an effort to determine their own peaks and troughs.
Given the advertised 50 hours of battery life that the Dyson Zone has, these would easily make our list of best wireless headphones on their own, even at a significantly higher price point than, say, a Bose QuietComfort 45. We’d like to know which audio codecs we’re dealing with. make, but we can forgive a few things if the mastheads are executed correctly.
Here’s where the Dyson Zone gets more Dysony: the earcups can draw in air and direct it to the wearer’s lungs via an attachable, non-contact visor – how many times do you put on your Bane voice? The Zone has a purification system centered around electrostatic filters that capture 99% of particles as small as 0.1 microns. The company has also incorporated carbon filters to remove harmful oxides and ozone commonly found in urban pollution. The Zone can track and communicate information about noise and air pollution in their immediate vicinity via the MyDyson app.
We’re not ultimately surprised about the mission, nor how Dyson goes about it – it’s got a track record of this sort of thing, you know. But since both have played a part in one product and, more importantly, at the same time… well, turning on the filter and turning on ANC reduces battery life to just four hours and lasts three hours to recharge the cans. And given that Gizmodo notes that at 670 grams, the Dyson Zone outweighs Sony’s WH-1000XM5 and the AirPods Max combined, it takes a lot more dedication than just the $949 you’ll need to get your hands on these headphones.
If you want to be an early adopter, that commitment means booking an appointment at your local Dyson Demo store when the Zone launches in March in the US, UK, Hong Kong and Singapore. It will also be available in China from January.