What would happen if you locked a bunch of engineers in a room for
6 years without any adult supervision? Well, the fine folks at Vault-Tec, err,
Dyson have done just that! Presenting the Dyson Zone! Headphones with a built-in air purifier.
Okay so, in theory this would be appealing to anyone living in busy polluted cities. The
problem is, it’s not very effective without a seal between the clean air and your face.
Interestingly enough, this unlisted video suggests that Dyson had an
attachable face covering in mind for this product—with instructions and
everything—but it never made it to the final product for some reason.
Oh and this might not be a great fit if you have a big nose like mine!
Now Dyson have said that these are first and foremost a set of headphones,
likely to preempt criticism of the awkward air filter aspect. Because, at a whopping 3.1 lb when
combined with the carrying case, I’d say these are a bit heavy for a “headphones first” approach.
We’ll come back to the weight of these things later in the teardown but for now,
check out the cool spinning fan! Dyson has a lot of experience with
filtration systems and we can see that at work here.
The fan pulls the outside air through the filters,
causing any particles and pollutants in the air to become trapped in the filter
while allowing the smaller air molecules to flow right through into the visor.
It’s not perfect, but the filters are supposedly
able to catch 99% of pollutants as small as 0.1 micron in size.
The first thing I want to do is to find and disconnect the battery,
which I’ll probably find inside the ear cups.
Let’s start by removing the metal filter plates, the filters, and the ear cushions—underneath
all that I spot 6 of the 8 Active Noise Cancellation microphones poking out.
A theme throughout this teardown is going to be the top-end build quality. It’s all very Dyson,
everything from the smooth metal finish to the royal purple screams luxury.
Back to the teardown, the replaceable filters sit on a plastic bracket that
also encases the fan. Several torx screws are holding it in place and on closer inspection
I can see that the fan assembly is also stabilized with rubber grommets attached
to this plastic casing. Vibration dampening without glue is a definite win in our books!
Ooh, what’s this little button here for? The fan won’t activate without a filter
in place and this switch, sitting on top of a spring loaded magnet, is how the system
knows a filter is loaded. The magnet probably interacts with a hall sensor behind the plastic.
Still no battery, so let’s turn the headphones over and try to get in from the driver side. This
seems to be the way in, a single flex cable allows me to detach the drivers completely.
There’s a fair amount packed in here and it’s definitely getting more complicated
with all these flex cables all over the place. Before I know it, things turn
ugly. I’m not able to remove any of the boards because of awkwardly placed ZIF
connectors underneath the boards and soldered wires on three sides. Massive repair fail here.
With the wires desoldered, I can finally remove the last of the filter mechanism: the brushless
fan motors. The headphones with faceplate, weigh in at 1.46 lb or about 6 bananas for my metricly
inclined brethren. It turns out that just over half a pound can be attributed to the filtration
system. That leaves the headphones at 0.93 lb, much closer to the 0.85 lb of the AirPods Max.
Moving on to the next repairability fail, we’ve got c-clips securing
the earcups to the headband. While c-clips are compact, lightweight,
and work just fine from a longevity standpoint, they aren’t easy to remove
or replace. I get the tradeoffs, but repairability shouldn’t have been one of those tradeoffs.
With the ear cups apart, I can confidently say that I haven’t found any batteries yet. So,
on to the headbands because if they aren’t here then these are bloody well powered by dark magic.
No witch burning today folks, while I nearly broke my spudger getting in, there are two
battery packs hidden in the headbands, each pack consisting of a twin cell 4.89 Wh lithium polymer
battery. That’s nearly twice the capacity of the AirPods Max’s 2.66 Wh batteries.
And there it is, the filtration headphones from Dyson. I’m left with many questions. Will Dyson
usher in a new trend of visored pedestrians? How long before people start stuffing this
thing in the back of their closets and forget they ever existed? Will Dyson ever release the
“community cover” that would have enabled the filtration system to work properly?
One thing I know for sure, this $1000 headset is not user serviceable. From
multiple soldered wires to very difficult to detach battery packs,
the Dyson Zone presents a very intimidating repair challenge to anyone.