These headphones don’t reinvent the game, but they still get the win

Reviewing a pair of great headphones is a special privilege wholly separate from that of other gadgets; music is already a balm, and having its aural alacrity reinforced by hearing one’s favorite songs changed or improved by the new hardware is such a joy.

Add to that excitement the weight of expectation and you have a potentially transformational experience. I think many Sonos speaker owners, and fans of the brand, are in a similar position to me. We have been waiting years for Sonos to enter a new category, to graduate from the living room, den or, most recently, backyard, to the private persuasions of portability. With the Ace, Sonos hasn’t exactly reinvented the headphone, but it’s created a product that, in spite of recent reputational damage inflicted by a botched app rollout, should bolster its brand.

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Price, specs, and availability

To the consternation of many would-be buyers, the Sonos Ace headphones cost $449, a price that’s unlikely to waver much throughout its lifespan. That prices it well above its two primary competitors from Sony and Bose, which are both mid-product cycle, and just under Apple’s AirPods Max, which can be purchased for just under $500 on sale these days.

The Ace come in two colors, Black and White, and while I have the former in for review, largely because I’m conservative when it comes to headphone hues, I think the soft white option is the pick, as it doesn’t show fingerprints as easily.

Available starting June 5th, the Sonos Ace is sold everywhere Sonos products are, including Amazon, Best Buy, Crutchfield, and from the company itself.

Hardware and design

Sleek, modern, and a little hot

When Sonos acquired Scottish headphone maker RHA in late 2021, it wasn’t clear how much of the company’s design DNA would make its way into the eventual (and inevitable) headphone its intellectual property helped facilitate. In its decade prior to the acquisition, RHA was known for sleek and modern earbuds with high-quality drivers and an attention to detail, from leather carrying cases to braided cables, that made them a darling of the indie space, but the company never rose above cult status.

Still, when I spoke to Maxime Bouvat-merlin, Sonos’s Chief Product Officer, he told me that the company wouldn’t have been able to build the Ace without the knowledge — and the people — that came with the company. Sonos has kept an R&D office open in Glasgow to this day, and much of the Ace’s development was done there.

I really like the Ace’s design: the headphones are modern and comfortable, with an internal hinge that covers much of an over-ear headphone’s exposed moving parts. The plush ear cups are removable (and uniquely identifiable, which is a nice touch to quickly tell left from right) and lock into place with strong magnets, an amenity I appreciate very much after enjoying the same on the AirPods Max for many years now.

Sonos is adamant that gesture controls introduce more problems than they solve, so its Content Key feels like a consummate solution. It’s a single button that operates on two planes: the first, a strict up-and-down slide for volume changes; the second, a static press for play/pause or a hold to activate what amounts to the headphone’s ace-in-the-hole (sorry): home theater audio swapping. More on that later.

I wore the Ace in every possible condition: inside, at ambient temperatures; outside, on cold, dry days; outside, on warm, humid days; in front of my computer; in front of my TV; stationary; active (but not sweating). At 312 grams, they’re heavier than the Bose QuietComfort Ultra Headphones (253 grams) and the Sony WH-1000XM5 (249 grams) but not quite the neck-straining 383 grams of the AirPods Max.

They’re very comfortable… until they’re not. The vegan leather earcups are plush and cushiony, which is lovely for an air-conditioned living room, but in the humid summer heat, their plushness, combined with a head-clamping tension that’s slightly too firm for my liking, creates a pressure cooker of discomfort that forces me to take them off every 15 minutes or so.

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Granted, this is a problem with many over-ear headphones — there’s a reason I rarely leave the house with anything but the Bose QC Ultras — but it still needs to be pointed out. Sonos makes it very easy to clean the cups, though, and because they’re removable, we’re likely to see third-party options that cater to different head sizes and clamping preferences.

Sound quality & ANC

A legitimate first-try triumph

I really took my time testing the Ace’s audio quality; I own many over-ear headphones, from the need-an-amplifier wired variety to the cheap-and-cheerful Bluetooth category that’s proliferated over the past few years.

When I asked Sonos’s team about its sound profile, the engineers told me that it tried to recreate its best speakers’ balanced approach, optimized for both music and the home theater. The good news is that the Ace have a lovely out-of-the-box sound profile, with rich bass and sub-bass, smooth vocals, and a bright but not tiring upper range.

Songs like “John My Beloved” by Sufjan Stevens are beautifully recreated, with ample detail and a sweeping soundstage, but I’m less enamored of the way the headphones recreate voices, which are recessed compared to the same tracks on the AirPods Max.

This issue is even more pronounced on bass-heavy songs like “places to be” by Fred Again.. and Anderson .Paak, where the vocals are overwhelmed by the lower registers. It’s absolutely listenable, and easily salvageable with a bit of EQ work in the Sonos app, but it’s definitely a pervasive trait that conveys a bias towards home theater production.

I spent a lot of time going back and forth between the Ace, Bose QC Ultra, and AirPods Max, and while I preferred the sonic experience of Apple’s headphones every time, the Ace almost always came in a close second, and was my preference for genres like EDM, house, and some hip-hop genres where vocal clarity is less important than the overarching sonic experience of the track.

ANC is also a highlight of the Ace, though it doesn’t quite compete with its top-ranked competitors. It’s easily schooled by Bose’s QC Ultras, which do a much better job canceling some higher frequencies, but I found them to cancel about the same amount of noise as the AirPods Max, which is a pretty high bar to clear.

And like those Apple headphones, the Ace’s transparency mode is among the best I’ve used. I basically live with this feature turned on when I’m using earbuds, since I’m often just ambiently wearing them while lumbering around the house doing chores or making dinner, but I don’t find it nearly as useful with a pair of over-ear cans. Still, it’s very good when you need it, and just a single button press away underneath the Content Key on the right side (holding down that same key activates Siri or Google Assistant on your phone).

We do have to talk about connectivity a bit, though: the Ace support lossless audio only on Android through the AptX Lossless, which is supported on a pitifully few devices, most of which are not available in North America. On iOS, lossless over Bluetooth just isn’t available, period. Luckily, though — and I can’t believe I’m saying this — Sonos supports lossless streaming over USB-C, and includes in the box a C-to-C cable as well as a C-to-3.5mm cable. For anyone who trades in Apple Music Lossless, Tidal, or Amazon Music HD, wired is your best bet.

You don’t need a wire to enjoy spatial audio, though: Sonos has its own spatial audio toggle that can force any source to add an extra dimension, though I wouldn’t recommend using it unless you want to play Where’s Waldo with a floating keyboard somewhere above your head. Thankfully, it plays nicely with proper Dolby Atmos streams over Apple Music, Tidal, or Amazon Music, and for some mixes — I particularly like Vampire Weekend’s Only God Was Above Us — it’s a superlative experience.

TV Swap and the big Wi-Fi question

It’s not a portable Sonos speaker, and that’s a miss for many loyal users

I think a lot of people were excited about the prospect of a pair of Sonos headphones seamlessly integrating with their existing systems, allowing prospective owners to hand off or mirror whatever’s playing on one of the company’s speakers to the headphones over Wi-Fi.

Most people who had this hope, as I did, are going to be disappointed: the Ace is not some newfangled Wi-Fi headphone that will revolutionize sound quality or speaker integration or any number of other ideas one thinks of when replacing Bluetooth with Wi-Fi — generally a stronger, more reliable signal in the house — on their gadgets.

But Sonos assures me there’s good reason for this: Bluetooth is generally a point-to-point solution, meaning that it sends what’s playing on one thing to another thing; Wi-Fi, on the other hand, is inherently multipoint, and that requires considerably more complex engineering — and power — to do correctly. Sonos says that if it had enabled standard Wi-Fi playback on the Ace, by integrating it into its speaker ecosystem for handoff or grouping, it would have a massive impact on battery life.

Worse, that connection would not be sustainable outside of the home’s generally limited Wi-Fi perimeter, leading to what the company calls “a degraded experience.” (The Ace supports Bluetooth multipoint, but only for two devices at a time.)

Instead, what you get is the ability to pair the Ace directly with a soundbar, at first just the flagship Arc but eventually the two Beam models and Ray, to facilitate a so-called “TV Swap.” This essentially passes whatever is playing on the soundbar, be it a movie in Dolby Atmos or a song in stereo, directly to the headphones, and from my testing it works very well. It’s enabled through a long-press of the Content Key, at which point if the pairing is successful it will just mute the soundbar and start playing in your ears.

The good news is that Dolby Atmos mixes, while compressed down to 345kbps, are maintained in their 7.1.4 channel glory; the bad news is that, despite the compression, I experienced several glitches and drops through my several hours of playback.

I couldn’t pinpoint exactly when it happened more often — at first I thought it was during scenes where all the channels were saturated with sound, such as during one of the many fight scenes in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (great film, highly recommend a rewatch), but I accrued enough examples to prove that it’s likely just random connection drops between the speaker and the headphones.

I also found maximum volume, regardless of source (I used both Netflix built into my LG OLED TV as well as Disney+ through my Apple TV 4K) or content to be too low to meaningfully get much out of the experience.

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The other major drawback, at least right now, is that TV Swap is iOS-only and limited to the Arc; Android support, along with compatibility with other soundbars, is coming as soon as this month. Then there’s the promised TrueCinema mode which, like Sonos’s other calibration tool TruePlay, uses the microphones in both your headphones and the soundbar to create a detailed spatial map of the room, optimizing the in-ear sound to account for where you’re sitting in relation to the TV. It’s a neat trick that I’m sure will have a meaningful impact on sound quality, particularly with Atmos mixes, but it’s not available at launch.

My biggest gripe about the TV Swap mode, however, is that it just feels… small. I know it’s unfair to pin all of one’s headphone hopes and dreams on a single company, but given that Sonos has been rumored to be building a pair of headphones for close on a decade now, the fact that a point-to-point connection between the Ace and a soundbar is the only meaningful differentiator in an otherwise excellent but unremarkable pair of headphones is disappointing.

Then there’s the awkward messiness of the fact that, at least in my life, headphones rarely pull a dual function: they’re either in a case, in my bag, or in my office, next to my computer. The reality is that I don’t see many situations where I’m getting up from the couch at night to walk upstairs to my office to bring the headphones downstairs so I can watch a movie without disturbing the other sleeping beauties in my house; I’ll probably end up just leaving the sound on low.

Battery life, microphones and the app question

How much reputational damage did this botched app rollout cause?

First, the good news: that 30-hour battery promise on the box is real. These cans go the distance and then some. I used the Ace for several days straight without needing to recharge them, and the company says that a three-minute charge can get you three hours of playback, which sound both like a car insurance slogan and an ideal battery situation.

On the other hand, I’m less impressed with the microphone quality here; while I’m not someone who tends to make many phone calls while wearing a pair of over-ear headphones, companies like Sony and Apple have turned microphone quality into a table-stakes feature, and given how good the Ace’s transparency mode is, I’m surprised by how tinny, robotic and generally thin-sounding I’m told I sound on the other end of the line.

Finally, the ugly: unless you’ve been living under a Panamanian rock for the past month, you’ve likely noticed that Sonos released a new app to the kind of criticism reserved for hated politicians or the cancelation of a favorite show. Sonos’s app was never particularly lauded, but at least it worked, and had a set of features that long-time users took for granted: features like alarms and sleep timers were removed; playlist controls were gutted; and users have been complaining about a proliferation of bugs so pervasive they’re considering selling their speakers altogether.

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Yes, these are power users complaining on Reddit and not necessarily indicative of the wider Sonos community, but power users are the ones you need to win over in order to sell your brand new $449 headphones. I am by no means a Sonos app power user — I primarily stream to the speakers over AirPlay through Apple Music — but I’m pretty annoyed about one thing in particular, and it’s a good example of how Sonos, in order to release a pair of Bluetooth headphones with wide appeal, completely overlooked its most loyal customers.

Ever since Sonos Radio launched in 2020, I’ve been completely enamored of its variety and attention to curated detail. Every station, even the prosaic ones, help me discover a new or interesting artist. I even pay for the ad-free Sonos Radio HD.

So it generated more than a little disappointment to learn that it wasn’t possible to stream Sonos Radio to the Ace headphones because, according to the company, “The Sonos Ace is optimized to enhance the Bluetooth streaming experience, providing seamless integration with Bluetooth streaming services. While we understand the enthusiasm for Sonos Radio, our focus with Ace at launch was to create a versatile Bluetooth streaming solution.” In other words, to go broad, it couldn’t go deep.

Should you buy the Sonos Ace over the competition?

Ace vs. the rest

Sonos’s market advantage is that it does whole-home streaming better than any one other company. Sure, it has competition, but none of them has the variety of low- and high-cost options, in as many form factors, as Sonos. It is the clear leader in a relatively small market, which is likely why it felt like it could alienate a small number of its customers in order to position itself to better compete in a significantly larger one.

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But headphones are a very different value proposition: they’re personal, for one, and much more of a fashion accessory than speakers. People already have their favorites, from Sony to Bose to Apple to Beats to Sennheiser to Master & Dynamic, not to mention cheaper options like Soundcore and JBL.

Sonos is entering one of the most competitive spaces in the gadget world outside of phones, and while it’s done an admirable job creating a product that’s good at most things, and even outstanding at some, there’s more room for improvement in this first-gen volley than I’d like to see. At the risk of pushing the metaphor further than it needs to go: it’s not all aces, but Sonos still wins in the tie-breaker.