You would never associate Dyson with personal audio equipment (Bose typically rules that arena), but a recent patent for headphones has come as a surprise. Now some enterprising artists have made that concept a little more real with these shiny designs.
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Sarang Sheth of Yanko Design has given us his take on how this product would look in real life. It’s not official by any means, and is based on a patent that many never become anything you can actually buy. But these are still beautifully done and look super cool.
To break down the design, these headphones have what looks like two headbands connecting the two earcups. One of them is actually the headband that secures the headphones to the user’s head, but the other is actually a miniature air filter than you can lower in front of your mouth to keep the nasty particulates and microbes that you find in the air of busy cities or other highly polluted areas away.
The filter itself is based on Dyson’s existing bladeless fan designs, which you can buy a much larger version of for your own home right now. Air is drawn through grilles on the outside of the earcups, and then expelled through the moveable filter. As the patent says, these ‘phones would contain 12,000RPM fans that pump 1.4 liters of air per second through to in front of your face, letting you breathe in some fresher air than you would otherwise get.
The sound quality of these headphones would be questionable. With the addition of the high-speed fans, Dyson would need to invest in some excellent noise-cancelling tech to make sure you can actually enjoy the headphones as headphones too. Dyson’s not produced any audio equipment before, so perhaps it could do with making some key partnerships to help it out with this, or perhaps the continuously innovative company might have its own tricks up its sleeve to help make the audio sound good despite the spinning of the air filter.
Although they don't have air filtering, the Bose 700 headphones are our favorite noise-cancelling headphones. They will keep your tunes and calls a pleasure to hear even in loud environments, and are easy to use with a mix of buttons and touch controls.
