For years, Dyson has been producing some of the most innovative and advanced air purifiers on the market. And after delivering a world-class range of indoor systems, Jake Dyson and his crack team set out to tackle outdoor air purification, leading to the inception of the Zone project in 2016. After six years of development and over 500 prototypes, the envelop-pushing outfit has now unveiled its production-ready Dyson Zone air-purifying headphones.
The Zone headphones are equipped with precision-engineered compressors set in the earcups that draw air through the wearable’s negatively charged electrostatic dual-layer filters — which capture 99% of particle pollution as small as 0.1 microns — and delivers fresh, purified air to the wearer’s mouth. What’s more, the use of a potassium-enriched carbon layer manages to soak up city gas pollutants like NO2 and SO2. The Dyson Zone also uses a design that distributes weight over the sides of its wearer’s head rather than on top of it — a setup that was inspired by the shape and design of a horse’s saddle.
The Dyson Zone isn’t merely a wearable air filter, however, as this piece of tech is also a cutting-edge pair of active noise cancelation headphones. A total of eight active noise-cancelling microphones allow the headphones to monitor surrounding noise a whopping 384,000 times a second, mitigating background noise with incredible efficiency, and drowning out sounds as loud as 38 decibels. Clear and crisp audio comes from a set of custom-built 40mm, 16-ohm neodymium speaker drivers with a frequency response between 6Hz and 21kHz. The Zone’s battery also affords up to 50 hours of music playback when using active noise cancelation, or four hours of life when utilizing both ANC and air purification. Controlled via the MyDyson app, the headphones also sport intelligent signal processing, auto on and off sensors, a pair of additional microphones for telephony and transparency systems, and a specially-developed foam for the headphone’s ear cups that were designed with an equal focus on comfort, on-head stability, and passive attenuation.
Priced at $949, the Dyson Zone Air-Purifying Headphones are slated for a U.S. release in March of 2023.
