The new Zulu headset looks different because it is different. Made with magnesium, stainless steel, and four types of composite plastics, it's extremely durable and yet weighs just over 13 ounces.
Inside the headband is a core of thin, flexible spring steel, which gives an excellent fit with 40% lower side pressure than the 3G series. Luxurious, soft leather surrounds 'extra wide' earseals made from temperature sensitive foam. Your ears have more space and greater comfort. Calibrated magnesium sliders adjust ergonomically to accommodate your exact head size with uniform pressure. The vented headpad evenly distributes the weight of the headset.
All wiring is fully concealed using patented design features, and Zulu folds flat for easy storage.
Magnesium Alloy Improves Passive Performance
When it comes to reflecting airborne acoustic waves, magnesium's physical properties are superior to any plastic. Magnesium reflects 10 times more sound than plastic cups while being both stronger and lighter.
By itself, magnesium resonates sound. But our engineers created a clever design that uses the sound reflecting properties of magnesium and the damping properties of plastics to provide an optimally quiet experience.
This allows the Zulu earcup to be half the thickness of the traditional design. Yet it has a superior, rigid barrier for attenuation.
Bluetooth® Compatibility
Bluetooth® allows Zulu to connect wirelessly with your cell phone, MP3 player, or other compatible device. The wireless phone interface with controls are embedded into the battery box, allowing easy switching between phone and music inputs.
The audio quality is excellent, providing full stereo sound with the all the richness of Zulu's FRC audio system.
Audio Quality That Puts You "Front Row Center"
Audiophile Components
It's so quiet in a Zulu headset, you can actually appreciate fine audio. Fortunately, our design team included musicians and audiophiles. From the start we intended to set a new standard in clarity and fidelity.
Typical aircraft headset designs set the bar of distortion at perhaps 1%. By using audiophile components at every point, Zulu's distortion is one tenth this amount.
Here are just a few of the premium components we insisted on:
- Gold contacts for all wire connections provide both long term connection integrity and preserves the audiophile potential of the rest of the signal path.
- High Grade audio quality film capacitors are used throughout the signal path.
Two totally independent auxiliary inputs, both capable of cell phone and stereo connectivity. One is wired, one is Bluetooth®. No wires required to listen to your music or talk, and the switchover from music source to phone is seamless. Even the comm. Priority muting automatically defeats when you get a call.
- A noisy intercom could make such an excellent audio system moot. We solved this problem with Noise Gating Technology (NGT) to eliminate intercom noise totally (Patent Pending).
- Cockpit communications have priority with a patented, selectable Soft Muting feature that quickly mutes music sources.
Front Row Center
Since the invention of the stereo, it's been known that headphones have an inherent design flaw. The right and left channels are totally isolated from each other. When sound engineers mix music, they listen to speakers so that sound from both right and left are heard by both ears. The sound from the right speaker will be louder at some frequencies because the left ear is "shadowed" by the head. Your brain uses this difference to create a 3D sound image. Recording engineers design recordings to take advantage of this phenomenon to provide a "stage" in front of the listener. With headphones, the stage is perceived between the ears.
Our engineers solved this problem by electronically duplicating the sounds the left ear would hear from the right speaker (and vice versa), the way the recording engineer intended it to be. It really sounds like you're really in the best seat in the house. So we called it Front Row Center (FRC)(Patent Pending).
The Zulu FRC processor closely matches the shadowing effect of the head for the "crossfeed" signal to either ear. The signal is both amplitude and delay corrected to compensate for the shadowing effect, increased distance the sound would travel. The results are extremely pleasing and akin to switching from mono to stereo. We paid special attention to preserve the fidelity of mono signals to prevent lessening the remarkable voice clarity of the Zulu. Once you push the button, you won't ever want to turn it off. But we gave you a button so you could decide for yourself.
The Best Active Noise Reduction We've Ever Made
Because of it's unique earcup design, Zulu has more total noise cancellation than any headset on the market. Simply put, you get broader noise attenuation over the entire audible range.
Rather than concentrating purely on cutting decibels, our engineers looked at how pilots perceive noise at different frequencies. Their goal was to make the Zulu feel so much than any other headset, that when someone put it on, the first words would be "Wow".
They worked on cutting the most sound at the amplitudes that are perceived by your ears as the noisiest. They discovered that a 3dB cut at one frequency makes a bigger difference than 10dB at this frequency at another.
The result of their work is a headset that really is noticeably quieter than any we or anybody else has ever made. You put on the Zulu and your first word is "Wow."
