Dyson OnTrac Review: Buy These vs AirPods Max?

Intro well Dyson made headphones again but this time no more strange air purification mask across your face just good old Dyson style headphones that are pretty big so let's go over what these $499 pair of overear headphones have to offer and yes I know they are quite expensive but so are airpods Macs which still retail for $5.49 though you can find them cheaper elsewhere and even the Sonos Ace a pair I recently reviewed and love so much those are also in the same price range with the design and build Design & battery life quality Dyson is definitely holding up its end of the bargain though I mean no surprise Dyson kind of always likes to over engineer things and I always end up really liking that the over engineering actually has some functionality though when it comes to the headband here you see these things that look like cushions well this top part's a cushion but then over here these are actually high capacity lithium ion battery cells they are on top of this headphone they are spread out for better weight dispersion and offer up 55 hours of battery life withc on that's absolutely wild I mean Dyson claims that you can listen for about two weeks before you have to charge which obviously is not two weeks straight about 3 hours of daily average use but that's still insane now I do Customization and color options really love the look of the ear cups and these outer caps here these are actually customizable and so are the ear cups just simply twist each one of them off and then you can go ahead and replace them with different colors and there are tons of different color options which makes the uh color combination possibilities endless you can also get different color headbands you can't replace these these are just kind of the choices that you get um but I really like the different styles and options that you can get but overall these are just really wellb built with high quality materials throughout and nothing feels cheap or flimsy at all I absolutely love it now on the left ear Buttons and controls cup you have your power button and USBC charging port and the right has the intuitive joystick for controlling various aspects of your music like play pause skipping tracks your volume up and down and if you hold it down you can actually initiate Siri in terms of Comfort comfort I think this is kind of the bigger overall negative and it's not like they're uncomfortable to wear but after long periods of use the size and the weight of these ear cups do become a bit too much for the side of my head these are pretty heavy headphones especially when you look at the weight 450 G compared to something like airpods Max at only 385 which is still pretty heavy it's pretty jarring to look at but Dyson does a great job at weight distribution and it's not entirely in the ear cups like the airpods max I will say that's where a lot of the discomfort comes in but when you load these things up with batteries and you have the heavy ear cups I mean you're going to pay the price but that's not like they're so uncomfortable that I wouldn't recommend these or that I wouldn't you know actually use these myself it's just that's where the biggest negative comes in and that's what you get when you have again 55 5 hours of heavy battery usage and a lot of these premium materials now Dyson OnTrac unique features before we get into sound quality let's quickly go over some of the rapid fire features that you might want to know about like there is onar head detection which is nice so if you remove your headphones they will stop playing Dyson offers realtime soundtracking that continuously monitors in ear and external volume and and you know it kind of indicates potentially harmful levels throughout live reports and you'll get that in the my Dyson which I thought was kind of cool Insight speaking of the my Dyson app it exists and there's quite a bit of features inside like controlling noise cancellation and adjusting the EQ the EQ has three levels enhanced base boost and neutral and I've been liking enhanced here for the most part I will say I am really bummed that you cannot adjust the EQ to your liking you cannot customize make your own profile that's a huge miss here in my opinion now the case is also kind of strange it's not fullon hard shell but it's not full bra like airpods Max it's kind of a combination between the two but it does a good job of protecting your headphones and you have the ability to charge your headphones while they're inside of the case all right well since we were Sound quality and ANC/Transparency talking about EQ and everything let's just go right to sound quality aspect here and I have to say that these headphones sound really good but I wasn't like super blown away I think it got better over time but for my initial you know uh First Impressions I was not super blown away and I don't think that they're anything better than airpods Max or Sonos Ace I think they're kind of somewhere in between which for sound quality those are two of my favorite headphones so that's not a bad place to be but I was just expecting a bit more and honestly if I could customize these with the EQ in the app I think that would fix a lot of my frustrations uh and just having my own custom sound profile would have been A+ and I probably wouldn't have any negatives to say about the sound quality I don't really have anything bad to say about ANC and transparency that is quite excellent though and so the sound effect that you get by the way when you double tap the uh sides of each ear cup is really cool it's like a cool suction effect and it really adds to the experience now I haven't tested these on a plane but here in my studio the uh AC system gets really loud outside the studio there's actually an airport like right over there and uh yeah it does a really good job of kind of getting rid of all of that outside noise and once you put music on that doesn't even better job of eliminating the outside sound but when I had it on with just music off I thought it was really good Should you buy these? overall I am definitely able to recommend these way more than Dyson's first attempted headphones with the whole air purification and everything that they sounded good and they were a lot like these just without the weird Bane mask and so at $4.99 I still think they're a little bit more expensive than I would have liked I think this would have been a home run at maybe the $350 price point but definitely a good pair of super high-end quality premium headphones I just the the weight is something that is a little bit of a negative and the fact that you can't customize the EQ is not something that I ultimately love but overall very good right up there with my favorites in the Sonos and airpods Max I'd probably still pick Sonos just because they are a lot lighter and I think they sound excellent and integrate well with my TV and these are just more of good Bluetooth headphones and you can actually plug in via the USBC Port if you want to but would love to hear from you in the comments down below what are you thinking are you thinking of picking these up definitely some good customer iation options in terms of colors would love to hear from you down in those comments this is mam with Mac Rumors thanks so much for watching and I look forward to seeing you all around in the next video