The much anticipated Sonos headphones are finally here, after years of speculation. Dubbed Sonos Ace by the multi-room audio streaming specialist, the debut Sonos headphones may well be a long time coming, but they may not be exactly what people were expecting.
Sure, the Sonos Ace headphones are super stylish and sound great, but they perhaps don’t fit into your Sonos system in quite the way we all imagined.
If you envisioned a similar setup to what we’ve currently got with the Sonos Roam or the Move, which act as Bluetooth speakers when needed but then slip seamlessly into a Sonos Wi-Fi system – as I admit I always did – then you’re not quite on the money.
Yes, Sonos Ace are Bluetooth headphones and yes, they can interact with other Sonos speakers but only a select few and not in the usual grouping scenario.
That’s because, when you’re not streaming music via Bluetooth when you’re out and about, the Sonos Ace headphones are designed firmly with your home theatre audio in mind.
The idea is that you can easily, at the tap of a button on the Ace headphones themselves of inside the new Sonos app, you can immediately beam the audio from your Sonos soundbar (and any connected rear speakers and subwoofers) straight to your headphones.
At launch, Sonos Ace works exclusively with the flagship soundbar, the Sonos Arc, but we were told that the Sonos Beam 2nd-gen and Sonos Ray will be supported soon. The original Beam will also get in on the action down the line too.
The purpose is, therefore, to create high-end home theatre audio without disturbing anyone else in the house.
And it’s not just a bog-standard Bluetooth stream you’re getting with the Arc to Ace connection.
Sonos’ TrueCinema tech calibrates with the Arc so it knows your setup and best sound for your room depending on where you are sitting.
That process takes less than a minute to complete and, once you do, you’ll get full spatial audio Dolby Atmos, with head tracking tech for a super immersive experience.
The connection between the Arc and the Ace is over Wi-Fi, and the Arc is actually doing a lot of the rendering work on its hardware. If the sound from your TV audio stream isn’t Atmos, it gets upscaled to virtual 7.1.4 and it will upmix anything.
At a London briefing ahead of the official announcement, I got to demo Sonos Ace in a number of situations and the switching between the soundbar and the headphones is insanely quick and flawless… in fact, it’s hard to tell you’ve even switched.
On the music front, you don’t actually stream to Sonos Ace using the new Sonos app, you simply stream via Bluetooth from whatever music app you want, or use the line-in jack.
The Sonos Ace headphones support lossless Bluetooth and there’s full active noise cancelling tech (ANC) on board too, with eight microphones on the device, with six of these dedicated to ANC. There’s also an aware mode with noises piped in from the world around you.
Constructed from a super soft vegan leather and memory foam, the race-track shaped headphones don’t have the usual big R and L printed on them, rather use a different internal netting shade so as users can tell the difference.
The ear-cups are magnetically held in place and it’s easy to just pop them off to give them a clean, or indeed swap them around for different colors.
Sonos told us that they will launch in black and white, but more options could come down the line.
They charge via USB-C and a 3 minute charge will give you 3 hours of use. The battery max is 30 hours on Bluetooth mode. On Wi-Fi mode – when it’s relaying audio from the Arc – is reduced but we’re told they will “survive multiple movie nights.”
I’ve got the new Sonos Ace headphones in for testing and I’ll be putting my review live very soon, so stay tuned for that.
Sonos Ace launches on June 5th costing $449 in the US and £449 in the UK.
