(box sliding)
(packaging rustling)
(headphones snap)
(Marques sighs)
(upbeat music)
- [Marques] Okay, it's kind of hard to believe,
but yeah, this is a real product.
What I'm holding is the new
Dyson Zone air purifying headphones.
That's exactly what they're called. You can look it up.
So when this first started popping up
on actual Dyson's social media channels,
I had to double check the calendar
to make sure it wasn't April 1st because seriously?
Dyson, are you pranking us right now?
This is a thousand dollars for air purifying headphones.
I wasn't really sure what to think.
Probably safe to ignore it.
But then one by one,
videos started popping up on YouTube,
on Twitter, on Instagram
and people actually started asking,
like, "Hey, Marques,
can you check out those Dyson headphones?"
"Can you check out the Dyson Zone?"
So that look you see here is me realizing
I just spent a thousand dollars plus shipping
on something that I already believe is a terrible product
but I'm still here to do my job and find out anyway.
But here's the thing, and probably the weirdest part
and most important part of this whole thing,
Dyson, this product could only have come from Dyson.
It makes no sense, but makes all the sense in the world.
So ignoring the whole embarrassing social media campaign
around the vacuums for a second,
I love my Dyson vacuum cleaner, right?
A lot of people I know have bought Dyson vacuums.
No regrets.
We love these things. They're great.
And then over the years,
Dyson has built up a cult following and loyal fan base
over what is basically motors and filtration.
Dyson is a motors and filtration company
and they've built that out and turned it into
some of the most amazing vacuum cleaners in the world.
And they're also some of the most expensive.
Like seriously, if you want a stick vacuum,
you can just get one on Amazon for a hundred bucks easy.
But then you kind of get the feeling
that Dyson is the brand name that they're all copying.
But naturally you don't stop there, right?
You're successful with one thing, but you gotta branch out.
So what else do you do?
You've all seen the Dyson bladeless fan thing, right?
I mean, this is almost a legendary product on its own.
The Dyson fan slash air purifier
in the corner of the room of a $500 a night Airbnb.
Do other companies make bladeless fans now?
Sure, but people want the Dyson one, the $700 Dyson one.
Another successful implementation of motors and filtration.
There's also the Dyson hair dryer, another cult classic.
This thing is absolutely incredible.
I don't even use a hair dryer.
I actually use this thing to heat up the dbrand skins
to put on the back of my phones
and it's awesome for that too.
Another successful implementation of motors and filtration.
So Dyson is no stranger
to charging a lot of money successfully
for a seemingly niche product.
But that doesn't mean they can't miss.
You guys have probably heard about, maybe you haven't,
they made a floor lamp too.
Maybe you haven't heard about it
because it's less successful.
It's also $850 so they can miss.
You also might have heard about the car prototype
that they brought to CES, which like, okay,
yes you make motors,
and motors are one part of an electric car,
but there are lots of other parts
of a car that are really hard.
And trust me, a Dyson car is kind of a tough sell
no matter what you're gonna price it at.
So Dyson has a lot of hits and some complete misses.
So what's this one gonna be?
(bright music)
Okay, so this product is part headphones, part air purifier.
And I know about headphones,
so let's talk about the headphones part first.
And these headphones are absolutely wild.
First of all, they're gigantic.
They're absolutely huge. I don't even have to tell you that.
Now, a lot of the size will make more sense
when we get to the filtration part
and everything that's also inside these ear cups later.
But just as a pair of headphones on your head,
these things are huge, they stick out a lot to the side.
But honestly it's mostly the weight.
Okay, so Audio-Technica's M50s.
I've talked about those in the past.
Very familiar headphones, totally normal.
288 grams. Not that bad on your head.
Then you get to the heaviest headphones.
We talked about how heavy AirPods Max are.
Those are 388 grams, which is a lot.
These are 588 grams.
So it feels like I'm wearing a football helmet,
these things are so heavy.
Now, there's a lot of metal
but they do try to maximize comfort
with these really soft cushions
and the ear cups are super soft
and the top of the headphones are soft
and then it's this purple velvet color.
The side pieces are more for stability
to keep them in place on your head.
And honestly, if you're just sitting in one place,
not moving around too much listening to music in a chair
or on a train or something,
I guess then they're not terrible.
It's just the second you start moving around
or looking up and down or walking
that you really feel the weight.
It seriously feels like a helmet.
Material wise though,
it is nothing but the premium materials, I gotta say.
The headphone band is metal, the cushions are super soft,
the ear cups are metal through and through.
You can see the microphones very clearly around the bottom,
the USB-C port,
and the controls are actually very, very clever.
Everything is on the right ear cup
and it's mostly via this little joystick here.
So instead of trying to swipe on a finicky touch surface
or something like that, you literally tap up and down
on the joystick for volume,
tap left or right for the next track and previous track,
and amazingly, you can actually hold down the joystick
to the right or left to scrub forward or backward
in whatever audio you're in.
And it worked in a bunch of apps for me too, to my surprise.
Worked in Apple Music, worked in Spotify, my podcast app.
It didn't work in YouTube or SoundCloud,
but even, yeah, just the thought
of being able to fast forward a little bit
to the middle of a podcast or something on Spotify
is kind of sick.
I've never seen that before.
But of course with the super high price tag,
you hopefully care about how they sound.
So how did these sound?
Big premium, expensive, active noise cancellation,
40 millimeter drivers.
How did these, do they sound as high end as they cost?
No. They don't.
But they sound okay.
I mean, they sound like some two to $300 headphones
that I've heard,
even though they're built like $400 headphones.
But I'll say the sound overall is pretty balanced
and reasonably bass-y and punchy in the low end.
There's a pretty good passive seal with these ear cups.
And then the active noise cancellation
does a little extra work for you.
It is just a Bluetooth headphone.
There's no wired connection and nothing fancy
as far as lossless audio or special codex
or anything like that.
But you know, they sound crisp
with a little extra brightness in the highs.
What's more impressive
is so the active noise cancellation is pretty good,
but the transparency mode is actually excellent.
This is the best I've heard
from anything that isn't AirPods.
And you can double tap the right ear cup
to switch between transparency mode and noise cancellation.
The battery life of these is about 50 hours
which is right at the top of its class
for noise cancellation headphones with ANC on.
They also don't have an on-off switch
so they do on head detection, kind of like AirPods Max.
So when you take 'em off your head,
they go into this idle mode and you put 'em back on,
they play this nice chime, they turn back on
and now you're listening to music again.
Ergonomically they're not anything special,
but the joystick for the controls,
the transparency mode, these are pretty good headphones.
So that brings us to part two.
So like I said, this is a two-in-one product,
part headphones, part air purifier.
Let's just completely ignore the why for a second
just so we can just understand what's happening
and how this works.
So these headphones come with
this little plastic visor thing.
So inside the ear cups of the headphones,
you can pop off the outside cover
and that's where these filters go, that came in the box.
And those filters are covering these air intakes
and tiny micro compressors
that suck in the air from the outside world.
These filters help purify the air
by cutting down 99% of pollutants as small as 0.1 microns.
Then they pass that clean air through these slots.
The visor connects the headphones via magnets to these slots
and creates a seal so that the air
is channeled down through it
and passes over your nose and mouth
through the mesh at the front.
It is a pretty intricate setup
but the idea is pretty straightforward.
Basically like, oh, okay, you've got noise pollution,
noise canceling headphones, got you covered.
Oh, you've got air pollution too?
Fresh air all the time. We got you covered.
Now, the timing of these was actually super unfortunate
because contrary to what you might be thinking right now,
this has nothing to do with the pandemic,
nothing to do with Covid.
It happened to be announced right around the same time,
but this is really directly advertised
at people who live in or commute in cities
with bad air quality, dust, pollen, smog, gas fumes,
grass clippings, whatever it is, just bad air quality.
So the idea is you're about to go out on your commute
with the polluted world around you
so you put the headphones on, you snap the visor on,
and now you're getting the fresh air
the entire time you're outside with these fans spinning.
It's the idea anyway.
Now, I went through the painful exercise
of going out and testing these things
so you don't have to, okay?
So I'm looking kind of ridiculous on public streets
because hey, I wanna see if this will actually work.
I walked past roadways to see if I could smell gasoline.
I walked past landscaping
to see if I could smell pollen and lawn clippings.
I walked into a public Porta-John
to see if I could survive, you know?
And bad news, I could still smell a lot of everything.
I mean, there was a nice little stream of fresh air
going over my nose and mouth, it's a nice little breeze.
But yeah, you can still smell everything.
I think right off the bat
there's really actually two main problems
that hit me immediately with this setup.
One is when you put all these together and you put them on,
the fans, which are in the ear cups,
start spinning up and the air compressors turn on
and you can hear that 'cause it's right on your ear
and so you're hearing that through your music
so you can kind of drown it out by turning the audio up,
but that right off the bat was kind of annoying.
But then the second is there's no seal.
You can still have air passing over your nose and mouth,
but things can also slip in above and below,
even if it's close to your mouth.
So they want you to have as little of a gap as possible
and it's adjustable so you can shrink that visor down
as much as you want to basically have it
touching the tip of your nose.
But stuff will still get in as long as there's no seal
and nobody wants to walk around breathing
from a literal tube, like a scuba diving mouthpiece.
So yeah, this is just a built in flaw of the fact
that nobody wants that, that's the way it's designed.
Plus there's a bunch of other quirks
like once the filtration gets going,
the battery life goes from 50 hours to two hours.
The visor is super light and flimsy
because it's completely plastic,
presumably to be lightweight
and keep it balanced on your head.
But then it also has all kinds of weird scratches
and poor finishes on the mesh and rubber and plastic
and just feels really cheap and none of that,
none of that even touches just how ridiculous you look.
And then there's the whole medical problem.
So I'm not a doctor, but I do have a friend who is.
Mike also happens to have a YouTube channel.
You might have heard of him.
But he explained to me
exactly why this product is even more flawed
than I realized on the surface.
- Yeah, so I see a product
that actually confuses me more than anything
because I don't know who the intended customer is
because they very clearly say
this is not a medical grade product.
There's no seal that exists here,
unlike a traditional N95 mask.
- I look at the marketing material
and I see somebody out in a city, in a subway station,
on the streets and there's pollen, there's smog,
there's all kinds of other things and they put this on
and suddenly the air they're breathing is clean.
They don't smell or inhale any of it.
Is that a dream or am I missing something?
- They say that the product cleans up to
0.1 microns particles out of the air,
but it's not HEPA rated because a HEPA rated filter
will actually filter particles with a 99.95% efficacy.
It's not as good as an N95 mask, which has a seal.
And this is where a lot of misinformation
actually spreads with N95 masks, because when we say N95,
what we're saying is they have a 95% efficacy
at filtering particles that are 0.3 microns.
And you might say, well, a Covid particle is 0.1 micron.
So does that mean they get through N95 masks?
That's what some people who are anti-maskers said.
Most Covid particles that travel,
they are attached to things,
water droplets, respiratory droplets, that kind of thing.
So they're already bigger than 0.3
and they end up being captured by the mask.
But they specifically choose 0.3 microns
because when you go smaller than that,
like a Covid particle at 0.1,
it follows something known as Brownian motion.
And this is where these small particles
move so randomly around
when they're dissolved in a gas like our air,
that they end up being trapped by the N95 mask,
even better than the 0.3.
- Okay.
There's a lot of things to why this doesn't make sense.
I also saw a tweet
about how if you are specifically thinking about Covid
and you are someone who has Covid and you wear this,
now when you exhale, all of that air blowing
is now just being ejected out into space
where it'd normally stay in the mask?
- Yes, this device is not designed to keep your air
and your particles to your face like a mask would.
So what the company has said in response to this,
that there's enough room to wear a mask in between.
But to me, if you have room for N95 masks,
this eliminates the need for this product.
Because the N95 mask is more effective
at filtering the air and creating a seal than this product.
So why in the world
would you wear a mask that filters better than this
and then this thing on top of it?
But what I worry about is it actually creates risk
and it creates risk in two ways.
One is that it blows air directly onto your nose and mouth,
which are your mucus membranes.
Anytime you have air circulating areas
that have a natural level of moisture, you dry them out.
Dry mucus membranes are a problem
because they crack and create openings
for pathogens to enter your body.
Then it's cold outside,
this thing is blowing cold air at your mucus membranes
which actually causes vasoconstriction,
meaning less blood flow,
less white blood cells in the area protecting you.
Another problem.
And then the real problem,
I'm gonna really hammer it home right now.
- Yes, yes.
- They say this is like urban environments
where pollution is high, there's break dust, car pollution,
all very valid, all big problems we should address.
But in urban environments, based on CDC data,
the rate per hundred thousand
of deaths from chronic respiratory disease is around 35.
But you know what's 33% higher than that?
Unintentional accidents.
That goes up all the way to 47 per hundred thousand.
And you know what's increasing rates
of unintentional accidents?
- Are you saying that these noise canceling headphones
might actually cause more problems than they solve?
- Yeah.
- So why did they do this?
Dyson is a weird company.
Like I said at the beginning,
they're a motor and filtration company,
but they've had so many hits.
They've made these niche products
like stick vacuums and air purifiers
and hair dryers into cult favorites, which is crazy.
I can actually see how this product came to exist
and how it ended up being a thousand dollars.
Actually, honestly,
the thousand dollars part is the easy part.
When you just look at the materials and the cool tech
and the packaging that went into this thing,
it's kind of silly.
These headphones themselves are super heavy,
but yeah, they're all metal.
The cups are metal, the bands are metal,
and there's obviously a ton of tech in here.
The packaging is hilarious.
There's not just the headphones and the visor,
which look like a smiley face,
but there's also a super high quality carrying case
with felt lining.
There's a thick braided elastic strap
for that carrying case.
There's an extra set of filters.
There is the softest velvet headphone carrying pouch
I've ever seen.
There is a dual color braided USB-C cable
with a headphone jack adapter.
There's a metal airplane adapter.
There's what I assume is a reusable filter cleaner
with a handle and another carrying pouch
for just the cables and the accessories, also super soft.
And then there's this Dyson app that connects the headphones
that lets you not only change the settings,
but also gives you a live look
at a summary of the air quality in your area
and then gives me a live readout
of the audio levels of my environment
and how much sound the noise cancellation mode
is preventing from getting to my ears.
I've never seen anything like this with headphones
and live realtime data visualization like this.
Gives you a summary of your fan speed usage,
your noise cancellation usage over time,
and gives you an estimate of your filter life
and a direct link to buy new filters
for once you run out of the ones that come in the box.
If you showed me all this for a pair of headphones
and never even told me about the filter thing
or what brand it was from,
I would assume that these are at least $400 headphones.
But at the end of the day, most of this,
like so many other things in the tech world,
can be explained by branding.
It's only Dyson that could have pulled this off
and gotten this thing as far as it has
to get into this video.
But there's a sort of a term
that you've probably heard in the business world before
that a lot of companies use called the loss leader strategy.
- Barbara Corcoran was on my podcast from "Shark Tank"
and she taught me about this concept called loss leader.
And basically, she believes that products
that are gimmicky in this vein
will actually not make company money,
but they'll draw enough press
that they'll sell other products.
Perhaps that's what's going on.
- They earn press. - Yes.
- Yeah, 'cause there's loss leaders that are like,
"Oh, we can afford to sell you this hardware for cheap
and lose money on it because you'll buy the software
and we'll make the money back."
This one is a loss leader because no one should buy it
and probably no one will,
but it'll generate enough buzz that people talk about Dyson-
- We're doing it right now. - And they'll be, hmm.
Yeah, you win this round, Dyson.
Here we are talking about your stupid headphones
with your stupid filter
and you didn't even have to pay for an ad
like you wanted to so yeah, well played.
Thanks for watching.
Catch you guys the next one.
Peace.
(upbeat music)