Suffice to say that when Dyson launched its first pair of headphones in the Zone, it was hard for some to suspend their disbelief when they saw headphones merged with an air purifier that made you look a little like Bane from the The Dark Knight Rises.
But Dyson has learnt from what came before and with its latest headphones, OnTrac, it’s gone down the more traditional route.
That means no air purification module attached to these headphones, but still maintaining an aesthetic of a Dyson product, supercharged by the option of customising how the headphones look.
The OnTrac headphones come in a variety of colours but you can swap in and out the colours of the earpads and the outer caps to give the OnTrac a look that’s personal to you. According to Dyson, there’s up to 2000 combinations through all the various colourways. We actually rather like that, though we imagine the look might be divisive for some. Headphones these days come in black, white, or gray and they just look really dull.
Dyson claim that the OnTrac offer best-in-class noise-cancellation, using eight microphones that sample external sound at 384,000 times a second to cancel out up to 40dB of external noise.
The sound is delivered through 40mm, 60-ohm neodymium speakers combined with Dyson’s “advanced audio signal processing” to make sure that every note and word is delivered “with precision”. The headphones are said to be able to reproduce frequencies from as low as 6Hz to as high as 21kHz. From the hands-on time we hand with the headphones ahead of the announcement, they sounded similar to the Zone, or to the more recent Sonos Ace.
Battery life is rated at 55 hours with ANC on, putting them in the same area as the Sennheiser Momentum 4 Wireless and Cambridge Audio Melomania P100. The headphones’ battery charge is stored in two high-capacity lithium ion cells which are suspended on either side of the headband for a more even weight distribution.
Pricing is £499 and availability is direct from the Dyson website from August 1st onwards. Look out for review after the headphones launch.
