The Dyson Zone is here to clean up your air and play music

Given the original announcement for the Dyson Zone was around April Fools Day, you’d be forgiven for thinking that it might have been some elaborate joke.

But it is real and it is coming, with Dyson now confirming a starting price and period of availability for its first ever wearable.

If you’ve read about it before, you’ll know that the Dyson Zone is unlike any headphone you’ve likely come across, one that will definitely get people talking. It is, on the one hand, a headphone that supports noise cancellation and transparency modes, but it is also an air filtration unit that sucks in air through the filters in the earcups and passes through clean air for you to breathe.

It’s an unlikely solution to solve a very real problem of pollution. According to research conducted by some rather august bodies, 99% of the world’s population lives in areas that exceed the World Health Organisation’s safe levels for pollution, while a city such as New York is estimated to have 90% of its mass transit users exposed to noise levels higher than the recommended decibel limit where on continents such as Europe, West Asia and Africa, the primary source of air pollution is windborne dust (according to the United Nations Environment Programme).

So the Dyson Zone aims to combat both noise pollution and particulates in the air, with an air-purifying system that takes aim at 99% of particle pollution and acidic gases associated with city pollution such as NO₂ and SO₂.

If you want, the air-purifying filter can be detached and the Zone used just as a pair of headphones. There are 11 microphones within the earcups, of which eight are used to monitor surrounding noise at 384,000 times a second, with the Dyson Zone offering up to 38dB of ANC across the human hearing spectrum (20Hz to 20kHz).

Dyson claim that the Zone will be ultra-faithful to the reproduction of music, digging as low 6Hz and as high as 21kHz to communicate very note and word with its 40mm neodymium speaker drivers in the earcups.

The headphones will support the My Dyson app that allows you customise the EQ of the headphones, as well as monitor surrounding sound levels in dB, check the life of the filters in the earcups and the level of NO₂ around you.

Bluetooth 5.0 is supported with SBC, AAC and LHDC codecs supported (but no LDAC), while battery life is 50 hours with noise cancellation, though that figure falls to 90 minutes with both noise cancellation and the air filter set to its highest setting.

The Dyson Zone is expected to go on sale in China in January 2023, followed by launches in the US and the UK in March. Prices are expected to start at £749 but exact pricing is stated as coming closer towards launch.

You can get our feelings on how the Dyson Zone worked as we went hands-on with the product in late November.