Dyson's Air Purifier Headphones To Start Selling in Early 2023
When the Dyson Zone was first announced earlier this year, many people thought it was an early April Fool's joke. Well, the air-purifying headphones are indeed coming, and we had the chance to hear from the folks at Dyson about it.
After six years of development, the final design of the Dyson Zone is undoubtedly more compact than the originally-envisioned backpack idea. There are two main components, the headphone itself along with a visor that blows purified air at the breathing zone between the nose and mouth of the wearer.
There are two compressors in each earcup that draw air in through the negatively charged electrostatic filters to purify them before blowing it through the visor, delivering two jets of purified air in crosswinds. There are onboard sensors that measure air quality and user activity to automatically adjust airflow speed. We're certainly confident in Dyson's ability to develop air purifiers, so there isn't much to worry about here.
What about the audio side of things? Well, Dyson claims the Zone headphones offer not only pure and rich audio thanks to the 40mm neodymium drivers but superb active noise cancellation as well, with up to 38dB being cancelled out thanks to a combination of passive noise attenuation and a hybrid feedback feedforward ANC system. There are 11 microphones on the Dyson Zone, with eight being used for ANC, and while we haven't had the chance to actually try out the headphones for ourselves yet, we are definitely looking forward to pitting them against the rest of the competition, audio and ANC-wise.
Based on the units shown during the video call though, it was noticeably a bulky pair of headphones, so not something that you'd be able to throw into a small sling bag easily. The visor is also detachable, which means that if you don't require the air purifying feature, you can use the Zone as a regular pair of ANC headphones.
As for battery life, we can expect 50 hours of audio-only playtime, or up to four hours of battery life with the air purification feature and audio active.
The Dyson Zone will be going on sale in China from January 2023 onwards, with the Zone going on sale in Singapore, U.S, U.K. and Hong Kong in March 2023. More information about the Zone headphones can be found on Dyson's website here, with interest registration here. Information on pre-launch trials and local availability will be available in Q1 2023.