The Dyson Zone is an undoubtedly eye-catching headset. It turns out if you put a company best known for masterfully designed vacuums and air purifiers up to the task of creating a personal audio device, it’ll make a pretty unique pair of headphones.
The Zone are over-ear headphones that double as a portable air purifier for the smog-filled cities of our unevenly distributed future. While the headphones carry many of the thoughtful details you might expect from a company that crafts statement pieces as much as they do appliances, they also house more than a few unfortunate trade-offs.
Over-ear headphones that double as a portable air purifier for the smog-filled cities of our unevenly distributed future.
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After spending the last few years devoted to noise-cancelling wireless earbuds, the Dyson Zone surprised me with its ability to block out sound, and confirmed my suspicions that its novel ability to purify the surrounding air would end up being more annoying than useful. At $699.99, the Dyson Zone is no doubt a quality pair of headphones, but after using them for the last week, I’m not sure who I could really recommend them to because of all the other things they do.
Dyson Zone
The Dyson Zone is a curious combination of wireless noise-cancelling headphones and a personal air purifier that sacrifices fit to do a little bit of everything.
- Impressive ANC
- Air purifier really does work
- Up to 50 hours of battery life with ANC on
- Heavy and a little cramped
- Expensive
Design
Nails the ‘robot’ aesthetic
The Dyson Zone are a big pair of headphones — so big I think just about anyone would notice them. That really starts with the headphones’ metallic ear cups, which are covered in holes, jutting out well beyond what’s traditionally been an acceptable distance from your ears to accommodate the air purifier tech and replaceable filters that come with the headphones.
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At first blush they look like Dyson’s other products, a tasteful mix of exposed metal and colored plastic. Decidedly premium, but not quite luxurious and jewelry-inspired like some high-end Apple products. The Zone’s headband is adjustable, and each ear cup has a distinct hole for the detachable visor that directs clean air to your nose and mouth when magnetically detached. There’s also multiple buttons: one for controlling air flow, Bluetooth, and power on the left, and a button that can slide up, down, left, or right to adjust volume, skip tracks, or be pushed in to play or pause whatever you’re listening to on the right.
What those visual descriptions miss is how heavy the Dyson Zone is. At 1.3 pounds they’re similar in weight to Apple’s Vision Pro, and I definitely noticed how much lighter I felt when I took them off. Dyson took care to make the headband adjustable and the firm, but pleasantly padded ear cup cushions comfortable, but they still irritated me after 20 to 30 minutes of use. I thought it might be my glasses pinching my head, but I think it’s just that my ears are too big for the small cutouts the Zone has.
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The way the visor magnetically snaps on is super clever, but I never felt particularly comfortable, physically and socially.
There’s a certain charm to how big and goofy the Dyson Zone looks on just about anyone. With the metal filter tops sticking out, they look a bit like lug nuts, and make anyone wearing them look like a robot. That charm fades, unfortunately, when you attach the travel visor, which I found frankly kind of embarrassing to wear. The way the visor magnetically snaps on is super clever, but I never felt particularly comfortable, physically and socially.
I’ve gotten used to and have enjoyed the benefits of masking on public transportation and inside stores and movie theaters, but this calls attention to itself and is overly rigid in a way that I never got over.
Sound performance
The Zone really puts you in the (ANC) zone
The good news is you probably won’t be thinking about how you look because of just how impressive the active noise cancellation is. I wasn’t able to compare it to the Sony WH-1000XM5 or the Bose QuietComfort Ultra, but the Dyson Zone certainly did a better job blocking out distractions around me than my go-to AirPods Max do.
I caught myself on more than one occasion putting the Dyson Zone on just for ANC instead of background music while working.
Dyson says the headphones shave off 40 decibels of the surrounding sound, an impressive feat made possible by the 11 microphones placed all over the Zone, including eight microphones dedicated to ANC, two for noise reduction, and one for handling telephone calls. The company claims it samples sound around you 384,000 times a second to constantly adjust what you hear wherever you are, but whatever the reason, I caught myself on more than one occasion putting the Dyson Zone on just for ANC instead of background music while working.
Switching between ANC and Transparency mode is paired with a satisfying sound effect that sounds like getting vacuum sealed.
Switching between ANC and Transparency mode is paired with a satisfying sound effect that sounds like getting vacuum sealed. My only real problem with noise-cancelling on the Zone is that to enable it you have to double tap the side of the headphones, which never consistently worked for me. There are other ways to enable ANC, like the Dyson companion app, but I found it to be pretty annoying all the same.
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Loud and clear with a basic app
Listening when music is on, the Dyson Zone is a satisfying, if not spectacular experience. For one thing, audio plays extra loudly in the Zone. I was honestly surprised how low I could keep the volume and still feel like I wasn’t missing any of the details of my favorite tracks. You might be able to attribute it to the 40mm speaker drivers in the Zone, but I think ANC helped as well.
Nothing sounded muddled per se, but I did feel like there was more dimension to the songs on the AirPods Max that I was missing on the Dyson Zone.
The one thing that did bother me was the lack of separation I noticed between parts of a track. Nothing sounded muddled per se, but I did feel like there was more dimension to the songs on the AirPods Max that I was missing on the Dyson Zone. A more distinct sense of treble, mid, and bass that makes them feel alive instead of flattened. I don’t think that’s a dealbreaker (though these headphones do cost close to $700), but I was disappointed that even if I did want to tweak things I was left with very little to do in the Dyson app.
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After you use it to set up your Dyson Zone, the Dyson app is mainly used to display air quality information for your current location, current nitrogen dioxide levels that your Zone has detected, the current sound levels and if you’re listening at a safe volume, a history of both measurements with charts that change and grow, and if you dive in, noise cancelation controls and a super-limited equalizer. The equalizer has settings for “Enhanced” (focused on mids and treble), “Bass Boost” (self-explanatory) and “Neutral.” That’s not a lot to work with if you’re looking to tweak the Zone’s audio to your preferences.
Portable air purifier
Maybe not meant to be ear-mounted
While Dyson doesn’t over-emphasize it in its product marketing or on its store page, the thing that makes the Dyson Zone unique is its ability to function as a portable air purifier, an idea that should be interesting to just about anyone now that airborne threats are increasingly common and cities are getting more polluted. The Zone does its air purifying magic by sucking in air through electrostatic carbon filters in the earcups and shooting clean air through the detachable visor that covers your nose and mouth. It sounds simple, but shrinking the whole process down into something you can wear is impressive in its own right.
The Zone does its air purifying magic by sucking in air through electrostatic carbon filters in the ear cups and shooting clean air through the detachable visor that covers your nose and mouth.
The Zone achieves 99% filter efficiency according to Dyson, but the filtration isn’t focused on capturing viral threats, which might feel confusing given the Zone’s initial introduction in 2022, over a year into the pandemic. Instead, the headphones are designed to eliminate fine particulates (as small as 0.1 microns) and gasses like nitrogen dioxide and ozone that form the building blocks of smog. In cities with a lot of cars or where industry is closer to where people live, there’s a real use for a wearable device that can help your breath clearly on heavy smog days.
The headphones are designed to eliminate fine particulates (as small as 0.1 microns) and gasses like nitrogen dioxide and ozone that form the building blocks of smog
In my tests, the air the Zone pushed towards my mouth was cooler, and at least to me, had a “fresh” smell that was different from the immediate environment around me. Of course, the busier streets around my house usually showed up as having “fair” air quality in the Dyson app, so my results may have been pretty nuanced, to say the least. Either way, the Zone does what it’s supposed to on the tin. I noticed a difference in the air I was breathing while wearing the visor.
That doesn’t mean it was enjoyable to wear, though. Comfort and fit were the biggest concerns I had while wearing the Dyson Zone’s visor. It’s flexible and can be stretched or compressed for a looser or tighter fit, but I still hugged my face strangely, even when I left the recommended finger’s-width of space between my face and the mask. Because of that space, there’s technically no real seal between your airways and the world around you, which doesn’t make it a perfect substitute for a face mask if you’re looking for that either.
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Using air purifying also impacts the battery life. I was able to get through over two full days with ANC and air purifying disabled. I never tried to push Dyson’s full claim of four hours with air purification set on low (there’s an auto, low, medium, and high setting), but I did notice a drop even during shorter uses. After a 30-minute walk with the air purifier features set to “Auto,” I saw that the battery life was lowered by five percent. With the high setting or even more ANC throughout the day, I imagine it could drain even faster.
Verdict: Should you buy the Dyson Zone?
There are legitimate reasons to consider the Dyson Zone. It’s a stylish statement even in its compromises, comfortable, assuming it fits your head and ears, and has fantastic active noise-cancellation. If that was all it had, that would make for a pretty interesting pair of headphones.
I can’t help but feel that the air purifier is a bit unnecessary unless you live in a very particular kind of environment.
But it’s more than just an audio device, it’s a whole other class of personal gadget thanks to its air purifying functionality. From what I can tell, the Zone does a great job of purifying the air, but that’s also the cause of plenty of the odd and uncomfortable parts of this whole headphone experience. I understand why these two ideas have been combined, but I can’t help but feel that the air purifier is a bit unnecessary unless you live in a very particular kind of environment — especially since it ups the price to $700.
Top five songs I listened to on the Dyson Zone
- Classical by Vampire Weekend
- Barefoot by Tanlines
- Where We’ve Been by Friko
- THE BOTTOM by MICHELLE
- mpossible by Shout Out Louds
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