Daisy One Headphones

Almost every noise cancelling headphone that offers you calm needs your phone to deliver it: an app, an account, a stream. Daisy One keeps the calm inside the headphone.

Daisy One stores five ambient sound environments on the headphone itself, played by holding a button, with no phone, no app and no pairing involved. Daisy calls it Still Mode, and the five tracks were recorded and mastered in California, the named ones printed with their coordinates beside them: Yosemite Falls, Joshua Tree, a brown noise bed, and a five minute guided breathwork session. Because the audio sits on the hardware rather than arriving over a connection, it works with the phone in another room, or on a flight with everything switched off.

The rest is conventional hardware done carefully. A 35 millimetre custom dynamic driver sits in each cup, tuned with the team's own DSP filters by engineers who came out of Harman Professional. Bluetooth 5.3 carries AAC, SBC and LC3 with multipoint, USB-C takes digital playback up to 24-bit at 48 kHz, and a 3.5 millimetre jack accepts a plain analogue signal with no radio involved at all. Noise cancelling is hybrid and adapts to the room, while five MEMS microphones with wind protection handle calls and transparency.

Two decisions tell you how the thing was thought about. The volume dial is machined from anodised aluminium and does everything by hand: turn for volume, press for playback and calls. The headband is Swiss-designed TR90, a springy nylon that flexes to the shape of a head rather than clamping it, which matters rather a lot when the point of the headphone is sitting still in it for a long time.