Sonos Ace Announced: Sonos’ First-Ever Wireless Headphones are coming
Well, the rumours are true. After years of leaks and speculation, it's been confirmed - Sonos are finally releasing headphones, and it turns out they might’ve had an ‘ace’ up their sleeve all along.
Puns aside, Sonos Ace will be Sonos’ first over-ear, active noise cancelling headphones, offering a thorough feature set. Sonos headphones will launch on the 5th June with a price tag of £449, placing them well and truly in competition with respected rivals like Sony, Bose, Apple and Sennheiser.
That’s not all! Along with this groundbreaking announcement, Sonos has also launched the next generation of their compact, portable speaker, the Sonos Roam 2.
For more information, read our full Sonos Roam 2 Announcement here.
Sonos Ace are a brand first, offering Bluetooth connectivity right out of the box. You don’t need to set these up via the Sonos app on Wi-Fi; you can start listening right away. Of course, you can choose to set them up in the app, which will give you more control, including EQ adjustment, control over noise cancellation, home cinema integration and much more.
We also know that Sonos Ace will offer a 30 hour battery life with ANC turned on, which, for reference, is 10 hours longer than the AirPods Max and 6 hours more than the Bose QuietComfort Ultras. Plus, you can get a further 3 hour battery life from a 3 minute charge. For a full breakdown of features and functionalities, read our Sonos Ace Review.
Want to know more? Watch our Sonos Ace Review video over on YouTube!
Sonos Ace will be available in either black or soft white, and they’re set to feature a slim, luxurious design reminiscent of the popular AirPods Max. Although, these will come complete with a real case, unlike their Apple counterparts.
In terms of design, Sonos Ace blends metal accents with a sleek matte finish, a memory-foam lined headband, and memory foam ear cushions that are magnetic and detachable, allowing for easy replacement down the line and potentially increasing the headphones’ lifespan.
To distinguish between the left and right ear cups, the design incorporates a contrasting colour on the right cup. The white headphones, for example, offer a lovely green colourway, which is a personal favourite of ours.
When it comes to control, Sonos has gone against touch controls that we’ve seen on some of the current class-leaders like the Sony XM5’s and instead opted for physical buttons to control playback, answer calls and switch between ANC and aware modes.
Under the hood, Sonos Ace has custom-designed 40mm dynamic drivers in each ear cup, which Sonos states render “frequencies with astonishing precision and clarity.” They’ve also said that the acoustic architecture enhances the bass response, so we can expect decent bass from these headphones too.
The Sonos Ace Headphones will also offer support for lossless audio and spatial audio with Dolby Atmos, and they will feature new Sonos Intelligent Motion Processing with Dolby Head Tracking to adjust the sound as you move your head, which we imagine will be similar to the Immersive Audio technology that you see in the Bose QuietComfort Ultras.
Given the sound quality of Sonos’ current wireless speaker lineup, we’re optimistic that the Sonos Ace will offer an impressive sound performance that can compete with the very best in this hotly contested category.
That being said, there’s a lot of testing still to be done, which we’ll be sure to share with you on our YouTube channel as and when we know more.
If we’re talking value for money, existing Sonos users are definitely set to be quids in as you get to enjoy some added features with these headphones as they will integrate with your Sonos Home Cinema setup.
Sonos Ace has been designed to integrate seamlessly with your Sonos soundbar, enabling you to send audio from your soundbar to your headphones with the press of a button for a more immersive listening experience when watching movies at home. Perfect if you’ve got kids asleep upstairs, your partner has fallen asleep on the sofa or you just want a more personal experience for watching a film
Spatial audio with Dolby Atmos will offer a more detailed performance all around you, and dynamic head tracking will work to keep you centred on what’s going on.
Sonos has also developed a new technology called TrueCinema, which sounds like an evolution of Trueplay as it will map out your space and adjust the performance. They’re saying this will render a complete surround sound experience from your headphones, which should help you forget you’re listening via headphones.
Unfortunately, from launch, the home cinema connection will only be available for Sonos Arc users, though we have been told that the capability will be coming to both the Sonos Beam (Gen 2) and Gen 1 as well as the Sonos Ray "soon.”
TrueCinema is also sadly not available for launch and is again coming "soon.” Hopefully we won’t have to wait too long for either of those, as we’re very excited to test this out and see how much of an added benefit this sort of functionality is for Sonos Home Cinema users.
Regardless of performance, the news of Sonos Ace is likely to send shockwaves throughout the industry. Entering a new category as competitive as the headphone market is no mean feat, but despite being “obsessively crafted” and treading new ground for the brand, questions still remain. Will they blow the competition out of the water? Or is there just too much ground to make up?
Whatever the answer - the demand for these headphones has been there for a long time, and we can’t wait to put them to the test. To see how the Sonos Ace stacks up, stay tuned for our upcoming review over on our Youtube channel.
For more information about the groundbreaking Sonos Ace or any other Sonos products, get in touch and one of our Tech Guides would be happy to help!
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