Dyson Zone Headphones Review: They're Real, And They're…
Are you ready to review the headphones, sir? Yes, Admiral. We’ve reviewed more than 50 pairs of headphones over the last few years. Some great. Some awful. And some downright ridiculous. But nothing we’ve reviewed quite matches the uniqueness of the Dyson Zone headphones. In a lot of the reviews we’ve seen, the audio quality is actually kind of an afterthought. So we’re going to take a listen and let you know how it goes. I just want to blast these to the highest level real quick. Here we go. It’s your funeral. Yeah, oh my god. You can’t hear
them. You can’t. You have to max the volume out on your phone to hear them at all. Right. They’re too quiet. But in terms of… Let’s try it without them. Okay. Let’s try them without the visor. Okay. Without the visor. All right. Well, they definitely sound better without the visor. I didn’t think they sounded better without the visor. I mean, they sound without… You can’t hear the fan, but they sound the same. They’re the best headphones I’ve ever heard that have a visor. They’re also the only headphones I’ve ever heard that have a visor. That’s
true. The big issue I had is that we had to turn up the volume on this phone all the way. And it’s still not loud enough. It’s not loud enough.
in terms of sound quality, if I’m not talking about visor, they had the opposite problem of a lot of headphones we’ve tested, where the high end was very clear, which is what we see on the Bose headphones, the high end Sony headphones. But then the low mids, the low end was not too present. So you end up with kind of a very treble heavy sound, which at first I started ranking things very highly. But then I started to notice that there really was no bass. So then there’s an EQ, which has no customized ability. You
just get three sort of random EQs that they picked, none of which are actually flat. I don’t understand that. They need to build in a good EQ that lets you customize it. The headphones have the potential to be really good, but the software is blocking that from being the case. Right. Well, I mean, with the enhanced, there was no bass. With the bass boost, it almost sounded like… Too bass. Too bass. It was almost, you know, sort of balanced. It wasn’t too heavy on the bass for me, but I also like bass more than you
do. My main complaints are volume. Give us some volume, people. We need to be able to hear the headphones to be able to test them. I don’t know if any of the reviewers are talking about that because if they’re not… I haven’t seen anyone talk about this. If they don’t talk about it, they’re crazy. I also need to talk about the weight of these things. With the visor, 670 grams. That’s a lot. That is more than the AirPods Max and the Sony XM4s combined. Really? It’s not very heavy, and after a while, you start to
feel it. The other, you know, red flag for me is that without the visor, you get 50 hours of battery life. Great. With the visor, at the lowest setting, four hours of audio. At the medium setting, two and a half hours of audio. Battery life. Two and a half hours total battery life before you need to charge it up again. At the highest setting, an hour and a half. And I wonder what that would do for, like, you know, charge cycles with the batteries. Like, if you’re putting them through all those charge cycles, I feel
like the batteries on these, if you’re using the highest air purifier setting, is going to need to be replaced relatively quickly, especially compared to other headphones. Not to mention the fact that you’re going to lose all your friends. A lot of people listen to headphones in the library, right? Can you imagine? Oh my God. No, you can’t. You’d get thrown out. You’d get thrown out, yeah. They’re a statement in terms of style. Yeah, no, I think- This is going to stand out. People are going to say, wow. Yeah. So there’s no price involved and there’s
no visor involved. Where are these headphones? I think they’re maybe a little less- Three, three and a half, four. They’re average. Four, 4.25? They’re not as good as, like, the XM4s, the 5s, or the Bose headphones, the high-end Bose. Not as good as the AirPods Max. Because the AirPods- You’re right. They’re better than a lot of the over-ear headphones we’ve tested. Sure, yeah. Then again, you could also buy all of the other headphones we’ve tested for this price. So what’s up with the price point? Fans, filters, visor. I know, but it’s, like, cost prohibitive. On
purpose? Do they not want these to be widely adopted because they’re going to work out the kinks? I think that’s got to be part of it. If this is, you know, attempt one, we don’t want this to be mass adopted because then if it doesn’t do well- It’s mass failure. Mass failure. Whereas if we get a couple of people who try it out and they say, okay, well, you know. People like us who say, well, you know, the potential is there. It’s just we haven’t- Just don’t buy these yet. Yeah, blah, blah, blah. And then
we’ve done their job for them, right? Essentially. Let’s test out the microphone of these Dyson Zone headphones and see how they sound. I’m a little bit concerned about it. This is a test of the Dyson Zone headphones microphone during a phone call with the air filtration setting on low. This is a test of the Dyson Zone headphones microphone during a phone call with high air filtration. Microphone quality of the Dyson Zone headphones on the low air filtration setting, it’s fine. On the highest air filtration setting, it is. It’s really bad. It’s going to sound terrible.
People aren’t going to be able to understand you. And we’re in a totally quiet environment, getting a louder environment, it’s not going to be good. The My Dyson app can monitor the air quality around you, which is pretty cool, but is also something that can be done in the weather app on your phone. Well, not exactly, right? So you can monitor the air quality of the weather app locally, but not in your immediate vicinity, which these headphones allow you to do. The electrostatic filters in the ear caps need to be replaced up to every 12
months to keep the air purification system working. And the My Dyson app will let you know when they need to be replaced. How much do these filters cost? I’m going to guess $50. We actually don’t know the price, right? So if I go into the app, I can tap where it says filters in the upper right, and then I can tap buy filters online at the bottom. And I’m brought to this page, genuine Dyson parts for your machine. Very blurry image coming soon graphic and nothing else. So we’ll see. The Dyson purifying fan filter replacements
are $70 to $80. So I think $50 to $80 is a pretty reasonable guess. Let’s talk about the health benefits of these headphones. I mean, that’s kind of the main selling point. Is that purified air? Here’s what Dyson says. Dyson’s two-stage sealed filtration system removes city fumes. It also removes 99% of ultrafine pollutants to deliver purified air. Statically charged threads capture 99% of particulates as small as 0.1 microns, such as allergens. The filtration system also absorbs city fumes and gases such as nitrogen dioxide. Imagine you’re somebody who gets hay fever every spring is a nightmare.
Well now, you can just buy these $1,000 headphones, pop on the face mask, and you’re sitting pretty. Did you know that 9 out of 10 people breathe polluted air? I did, because I looked it up. I was the one who looked it up and told me to say it. World Health Organization. Now, is the solution for all of those people to buy these headphones, which at maximum air filtration have a battery life of an hour and a half? Probably not. Now, the air purification system is getting a lot of positive press, but there are some
concerns they could actually be a public health disaster. Seems a little bit alarmist to me, David. Convince me. We need to talk about the effect the air purifier will have on the people around you. Naomi Wu, who you may know as the sexy cyborg, has called these the Snot Cannon, aka the wearable super spreader event. It sounds like she’s trying to get attention with a clickbait headline, right? Well, let’s dig a little deeper. She argued that it’s far worse than no mask at all, because it uses high powered fans directed at the wearer’s nose and
mouth, which project exhaled aerosols outward. If you wanted to weaponize a virus host, it would be perfect. N95 masks. They filter the air you breathe in as well as the air you breathe out. There is no outward breathing filtration system on these headphones. Dyson actually responded, right? Maybe not to her specifically. Just to the concerns in general. The visor acts as a physical barrier against forward projection, which I guess is technically true. Anything you put in front of your mouth is going to, you know, you put your hand in front of your mouth and it’s
going to… Okay. I got that. Yeah. I got that. Yeah. You’re not getting sick. Right. You’re not getting sick. Yeah. So maybe you just breathe like… Ha ha. No N95 needed. Gotcha. We’re not medical experts. Fortunately, Slate already interviewed some, and we can talk about what they said. Lindsay Marr, an expert in airborne disease transmission at Virginia Tech, had this to say. The airflow probably makes exhaled respiratory particles travel farther and faster when first released than they would otherwise. Edward Nardell said it really shouldn’t have much impact on other people, and he doesn’t think these
would be any worse than not wearing the visor at all. Have any of these people actually tested the headphones? No. The leaks started to come out about these headphones, and everyone’s like, oh, this is a response to the pandemic. But it’s not. According to Engadget, it’s also supposed to include a community face covering attachment that would form a sealed solution so you can mask up while keeping your filtered air intact. We did not get this attachment. The Dyson spokespeople have been working overtime. They also said this, the air in the visor travels at a low
velocity so as not to be intrusive to others around you. It is not a powerful jet of air. The air expelled will not contain any higher concentrations of germs than exhalation would without the product. I laughed because it’s designed to not disturb the people around you, unlike the fans, which are just going derrrt all the time. When you put your hand in front of your mouth and talk, you can feel the air coming out of your mouth. So if this was going to be some sort of a major public health hazard, I should be able
to put my hand in front of it and feel some sort of air coming out of it. Let’s try and test it. Hey David, I am check, check, check, check, check, check, check, check. All the experts are stupid. There’s no high velocity jet stream of my breath going anywhere. It’s actually less than if I go like this and just talk. Because you do end up breathing into the mask. And what I noticed is that when I actually breathe like into the mask, that I felt it coming back in my face. Well, I’m not so convinced
by your experiment. What I hope to see is some real public health experts test out these headphones, put them through the scientific method, and give us a really firm answer. So you’re going to take their word after having never seen the headphones over my word. Having done the very scientific, put my hand up to the visor test. It’s better than they did, just because they’re experts. I think there’s a legitimate concern that the air purification fans would push your breath particles further. I think so too. But fortunately, we’re going to test it ourselves. We’re going
to try anyway. We’re going to test it ourselves in a way that nobody’s ever tested them before. Should we go get the smoke? Go for it. What did we learn, David? Well, that fake Hollywood smoke smells like nail polish. These headphones look great with a cyberpunk theme, and that’s about it for me personally. I don’t think we can really take anything away from our little experiment. So I do. I think we can take a lot away from it. So when we were looking at the smoke and David was just breathing out without the mask on,
we could see the smoke move out, which makes sense. Makes sense. I see you breathe. I don’t think we had the smoke all around, David. If all these experts are right, that these are going to pose a public health crisis because it’s expelling all your germs into the air, I think we would have seen something in the smoke around the headphones, but we just didn’t. The only thing we may have seen was a little bit of upward motion from the smoke. Which makes sense because there’s the visor in front, and otherwise the air would just
blow up and down. Yeah, it’s blowing this way. It’s going to hit your face and gone. Right. So I don’t know. I’m going to wait for the public health experts to weigh in here. There was no way he was going to have any confidence in this test. It’s not a crisis. Hopefully, these don’t have to be recalled. Big picture, nobody should buy these headphones. $1,000. You can’t hear the audio. The battery life is terrible if you want to use the visor. Which is the point. Which is the whole point. Unless you want to intentionally look
stupid. What I would do is buy Sony XM4s, the Bose 700s for what, $350, $400? And then buy $500 worth of N95 masks if you’re really concerned about the air quality where you live. And you could wear those with the Bose headphones. Sure could. How about that? Thinking forward, masks create a lot of waste because you can only use them, if you’re doing them correctly, one day to a week max. That creates a lot of waste. So if everyone could theoretically walk around with air purifying headphones on, I think that would be a net positive,
right? This is so far away from the effectiveness of a mask, I think it’s not even really worth mentioning. That’s true. Yeah. I mean, it’s obviously worth mentioning. Maybe it’s going to filter out some pollutants, but yeah, this is not pandemic-ish. No. Actually, we should be clear about that. It does not meet the HEPA standards. No. To learn about the headphones you should buy, check out this video next where we review dozens of pairs of over-ear headphones that are less expensive and sound better than the Dyson Zones. We’ll see you there. If you get a
shot of her eyes right now, it’s like… Are you not used to hearing this echo? No. Why is she not a fan? I just like it. I just like it.
