Dyson Zone review

It’s taken Dyson six years of research and development, along with no less than 500 prototypes, to create its first pair of headphones.

But the Zone are not your ordinary pair of noise cancelling cans because they can purify the air around you. 

Although they possess this unique ability, Dyson is pitching them as headphones first. As such, the visor that directs the air to your face is removable so you can simply use it when you like – or never, if you feel too awkward wearing it. 

As well as that social aspect, there are also other barriers here including the heavy weight of the headphones (even without the visor) as well as a high asking price. The Dyson Zone certainly have limited appeal, particularly in Western markets where mask-wearing isn’t the norm. But if, somehow, you’ve been looking for high performance air purifying headphones then you’re in luck. 

Design & Build

• Stylish but bulky 
• Impressive engineering 
• Plasticky visor 

As you’d expect, the Dyson Zone headphones are well made – mostly.  

The headphones themselves look and feel incredibly luxurious. The Absolute+ model I’ve tested comes in a Prussian Blue/Bright Copper colour combination whereas the cheaper option is a brighter Prussian Blue/Dark Blue combo with silver highlights. 

The cone shaped parts of the earcups are removable so you can insert/swap the air filters (they last up to a year) and the earcups fold to make the Zone more portable. The centre of each ear cup features a clear window where you can see the fan spinning round. This is also a touch sensitive area for doing things like switching between active noise cancellation (ANC) and aware mode but it’s not sensitive enough so requires forceful taps. 

The Absolute+ model comes with a large hard case that looks like it contains a pair of binoculars. 

Mostly made from a combination of metal and plush material, I think they look pretty cool. That’s if you don’t mind wearing big headphones because these are huge, even for over-ear cans. With all the tech inside, it’s perhaps no surprise but the Zone weigh 595g without the visor attached. 

The visor only adds 75g but this means it needed to be flimsy plastic and feels like something off a kid’s superhero fancy dress outfit. It attaches magnetically, and I explain more on the visor in the air purification section below. 

The weight makes them more suited to sitting in a comfortable chair at home rather than walking around on the streets, although that’s when you’re more likely to need air purification. Even using them sat at my desk, I found them uncomfortable after a couple of hours at most. 

Dominik Tomaszewski / Foundry

That’s because of the weight because they are comfortable in other ways, such as the luxuriously soft micro-suede ear cushions. Oddly, only the top pad of the headband is soft whereas the side ones are firm, but my head shape meant they didn’t make any contact. 

The fan button on the left earcup doesn’t just adjust the fan speed, it’s also used for power and Bluetooth pairing which is super confusing. Dyson really should have just put another button on for those. 

Another design flaw, at least in my usage, is that when reaching for this button, or the joystick on the opposite earcup, I almost always brushed my finger across the mesh section with a mic hidden behind it resulting in a harsh scraping sound in my ears. 

Dominik Tomaszewski / Foundry

Air Purification 

• Surprisingly pleasant 
• Live monitoring but no notification 
• Visor can be awkward 

Sure, the Dyson Zone are headphones with an additional feature, but the air purification is the standout feature here. In a marvel of engineering, the firm has managed to pack similar technology to its air purifying fans like the Pure Hot + Cool into some over-ear cans. 

The tiny fans draw air in through the ear cups and then feed it through the contact-free visor, with clean air being blown towards your mouth and nose. Dyson says the two-stage filtration system can remove “city fumes, viruses and 99% of ultrafine pollutants” including particles such as allergens down to a size of just 0.1 microns.

Now, I can’t test whether that’s true so I will have to trust Dyson. What I can tell you is what it’s like to use. 

Dominik Tomaszewski / Foundry

Typically, it’s easier to leave the fan on auto mode so the Zone can choose between three different speeds. You need faster speeds for more energetic activity rather than when the air is dirtier. 

It’s a strange sensation at first but I quickly got used to it and noticed the difference instantly when I took the visor off. In fact, I found it rather pleasant once the ‘new car’ type smell to the air dissipated after a couple of days. 

Although I found it quite nice to use, there are various downsides and complications to using the headphones in air purification mode. 

Firstly, do you even need the air around you to be cleaned? Well, according to the My Dyson app, the answer to that is almost always no. That’s almost certainly the case if, like me, you spend a lot of time sitting in a home office, but testing the Zone commuting to our London office showed the air quality well within the ‘Good’ green zone – even outdoors in central London. 

Dominik Tomaszewski / Foundry

I did find it reading yellow (uh oh) while on the train travelling into London but it didn’t stay like that for long. Oddly, the headphones are monitoring the environment around you in real time but won’t send you a notification if the air quality takes a dip to say you’d be best off with the visor on. You have to keep checking manually by opening the app. 

The other big barrier here is whether you feel comfortable wearing the Zone with visor attached in public. Almost everyone I’ve asked has replied with a straight-up “No” with a capital N, and I don’t blame them. 

Mid-pandemic, these wouldn’t have looked totally out of place, but now you really are going to stand out like a sore thumb wherever you go. I’m an introvert that mostly doesn’t like being around strangers, and I felt nauseous at the idea of wearing the visor in public. 

For the sake of the review, I overcame my fear and got a range of reactions from double takes to pure bafflement. Perhaps in markets like China where mask-wearing is very common, wearing the Zone would feel more natural. 

Dominik Tomaszewski / Foundry

The last issue is the fit as although the visor is extendable, there are various awkward elements in the way it works. The visor isn’t adjustable in height so to get it lined up with your mouth and nose properly you must move the entire pair of headphones.

For me, this meant moving the headband much further back on my head than I do when not using the visor and it’s more uncomfortable.  

The visor also flips down on hinges towards your neck so you can quickly have a conversation or take a sip of your coffee. This will also, by default, pause your music and switch ANC to its transparency mode. 

That’s fine – and you can switch that off in the settings if you wish – but if you have a longish beard like me, the problem is when you try and put the visor back up to your face. My beard gets well and truly taken along for the ride and requires awkwardly putting back where it belongs. 

Sound Quality & ANC 

• Custom 40mm drivers 
• ANC with two modes 
• Three EQ settings 

With the slightly mad sci-fi element covered, let’s see how the Zone perform as pure headphones. They’re Bluetooth 5.0 but you can also use a headphone jack if you get the in-flight kit (included with the pricier model) as it includes a cable that plugs into the Zone’s USB-C port. 

Inside those huge ear cups are custom made 40mm neodymium drivers to deliver “a broad frequency range for absolute clarity in bass, mids and highs”, according to Dyson.

Dominik Tomaszewski / Foundry

One thing is for sure: the Dyson Zone sound amazing and are sonically one of the best pairs of over-ear headphones I’ve tested in a long time. There are three EQ settings to choose from in the app: Enhanced, Bass Boost and Neutral. 

I flip-flopped between the first two depending on what I was listening to but the default Enhanced setting typically sounds great for most content. 

The Dyson Zone offer warm, rich bass tones but more importantly, present an incredibly detailed and clear sound across the mid and high tones. There’s a real dynamic and live presence to the audio that is very immersive and captivating. 

There’s very little in the way of distortion if you pump the volume up high, although if you’re worried about damaging your hearing you can set an 85dB limit in the app. 

Active noise cancelling is also up there with the likes of Sony and Bose. That’s partly down to decent noise isolation from the headphones themselves along with no less than eight mics dedicated to ANC.

The Zone can easily get rid of what’s going on around you, such as traffic and speech. It’s a shame that you can’t adjust the level but you can switch to a Transparency mode to intentionally hear what’s going on around you.  

Dominik Tomaszewski / Foundry

See also  Kodak Step Prompt Digital camera assessment

Frustratingly, you can’t switch ANC off with the touch controls so you’ll need to do it via the My Dyson app. 

It’s worth noting you can sometimes hear the noise of the fans when you’re using the visor. The whirring is quite light and easily masked by music and ANC on the slowest speed but becomes more audible when you use the faster speeds, which can somewhat taint delicate sections of songs. 

Battery Life 

• Up to 50 hours
• USB-C charging
• Auto-off sensors

Dyson quotes a whopping 50 hours of battery life for the Zone with ANC on. However, you won’t get anywhere near that figure when using the air purification. With the fan at the lowest speed and ANC on, the firm says you’ll get just four hours. 

Note that when the battery reaches ‘critical’ level, the air purification feature is unavailable, so you’re left with just audio and ANC. 

A full charge will take around three hours and to help save the battery running down, sensors can tell when you’ve removed the headphones in order to automatically pause music and shut the fans off.  

Dominik Tomaszewski / Foundry

Price & Availability 

The Dyson Zone headphones, as you might predict, are not cheap. They are unique and contain an impressive amount of engineering to fit air purification tech into them. 

Still, I’m not sure anyone expected them to start at $949.99/£749.99, and that’s for the regular model. If you want the nicer looking Absolute+ model (exclusive to the official store) tested here, complete with Explorer Case, soft pouch and in-flight kit, you’ll need to pay $999.99/£819.99. 

In the US you can buy the Zone headphones from Dyson or BestBuy. In the UK you can choose from the official store, Currys and John Lewis. 

The price makes even the $549/£549 Apple AirPods Max seem cheap. Then when you look at flagship Sony and Bose models, you could buy multiple pairs of the WH-1000XM5 or QC45 for the same price as one pair of Dyson Zone. 

See more options in our best noise cancelling headphones chart.

Verdict 

Being so unusual makes the Dyson Zone, in this particular case, difficult to sum up.

On the one hand, they are an engineering and technological marvel but on the other hand, they are a cumbersome and awkward proposition. 

As a pair of headphones, they are very good indeed. Up there with the best in terms of build, audio quality and ANC performance, with the added bonus of offering incredible battery life when used for just audio.

Add in the air purification and while unique, the visor feels cheap and the social awkwardness of wearing it in public will instantly put most people off – especially in the bashful UK. Even if you don’t mind the attention, the app’s environmental monitoring suggests it’s rarely needed anyway.

The Dyson Zone headphones are difficult to recommend in two simple areas: they’re too heavy and too expensive. Even if you can stomach the latter, you’ve really got to use the air purification to justify the cost.

Specs

• 200 x 210 x 240mm (with visor)
• 595g (no visor)
• 670g (with visor)
• 11 total microphones for ANC and telephony
• ANC up to 38dB
• Transparency mode
• Auto Mode (with activity detection)
• Air quality sensors
• 6Hz – 21kHz frequency response
• 0.08% @ 94dB 1kHz distortion
• Bluetooth 5.0
• SBC, AAC & LHDC codec support
• 40mm neodymium drivers
• Filter efficiency is 99% at PM0.1
• Can capture NO2, SO2 and O3 gases
• Filters last up to 12 months
• 2,600mAh battery
• 50 hours of audio
• Low-flow up to 4 hours
• Mid-flow up to 2.5 hours
• High flow up to 1.5 hours
• USB-C charging
• 3-hour charge time
• 3.5mm via USB-C cable
• MyDyson app support