To say the Sonos Ace is overdue is to gravely understate the point.
Premium noise-cancelling headphones have become a hugely competitive segment over the past five years, with solid products from Bose, Sony, Apple, Master & Dynamics, Bang & Olufsen, and even Dyson. It makes sense that Sonos, the market leader for premium audio, would sell its own version.
Sonos certainly doesn’t offer the best value for money in audio, but they’ve built a large and dedicated following out of quality, style, and ease of use. There’s a certain assurance that whether you’re buying a soundbar, smart speaker, or Bluetooth travel speaker, it will just sound great, connect up easily to everything else through the Sonos app, and be utterly easy to use.
This is why it’s so surprising that it has taken the company this long to get into Bluetooth headphones. The result is that though the Ace are probably my overall favorite headphones on the market, they’re not as far ahead of the competitors as they ought to be.
To start with the strengths, they are some of the most stylish, well-built headphones on the market, balancing a plush leather band with polished metal arms and matte-soft touch plastic cups. The AirPods Max and Dyson Zone use far more metal in their construction and thus are a step up, but they’re also both a lot heavier. The Ace are an excellent middle-ground between those and the lighter, but cheaper-feeling, headphones from Bose and Sony.
The Ace are also the latest pair of headphones to ditch swipe controls for a pure toggle and button setup, and this is the best I’ve found. There’s a volume rocker—which can be pressed once to play and pause, twice for the next track, and three times for the previous track—a power and Bluetooth connection button, and a noise-cancelling to ambient-sound mode button which can be held for your “Assistant” software of choice. It’s intuitive, comfortable, and removes the mistap hassle of swipes, though I do wish these buttons were metal rather than plastic.
The headphones also come with a thin, soft-touch carrying case and steal some nice touches from the AirPods Max, notably the magnetic cups assigned earcups, allowing for easy replacement with wear. You can tell Sonos is paying attention to the details, wanting to make each just a little more pleasant than they need to be, such as having the most pleasant notification tones on any headphone. Those aren’t reasons to buy a pair of headphones, but they make you all the happier that you did. Put simply, they feel as premium as their $450 price tag, and though tech journalists have focused on the price, that’s right in line with their competitors and $100 less than the progressively outdated AirPods Max.
It’s worth noting that though its cups aren’t thick and plush like the Bose QuietComfort Ultra, the weight of the Ace is very comfortably balanced, and you barely notice you’re wearing them. The noise-cancelling doesn’t catch as much as the Bose, but it’s as good as any other competitor’s, and the ambient-sound mode is almost as good as the Dyson Zone, which remains the industry leader.
For sound quality, I find them a little flat-sounding on lower volumes but cranked up a bit and their 40mm drivers produce this enveloping punchy sound, putting vocals right up front, bass on your ears, and background percussion, piano, and brass spread out as wide as possible across the soundstage. It’s a more manufactured profile than the more natural audiophile experience of the Master & Dynamics MW75, but it makes for a fun listen. Rocking to the new Charli XCX album, “Brat,” as I took a sunny afternoon walk was pure dance bliss, and Chet Baker’s “Baker’s Holiday” was a sumptuous bath in bluesy jazz.
You can tune the EQ but only slightly. There are no presets, and compared to the richer controls available on competitors from Bose and Sony, this just increases or decreases “Treble” and “Bass.” With the Ace you are buying into their profile, and if you don’t like it, then you should return them. I found them great.
They are also the only headphones I use “Spatial Sound” on when watching a film, which keeps the sound fixed in space independent from the movement of your head. Ordinarily this is a gimmick, but Sonos have gone for a more natural effect than any competitor.
The flagship features of the Ace are also built around watching films. These are TV Audio Swap, letting you instantly transfer audio from a Sonos Arc soundbar to the headphones, and the upcoming TrueCinema feature, which will let that soundbar create a personal 3D sound profile for your headphones based on the acoustics of your room so the sound transfer is seamless.
They also have dual connectivity, letting you simultaneously connect to a phone and tablet or laptop for instance, but Sonos needs to update their software so that you can see which devices you’re connected to and change that.
The Ace are not a game changer; and yet despite having access to all its competitors, they are my new daily headphones. They have the best balance of comfort, sound quality, noise-cancelling strength, and build quality, and all without any issues beyond the occasional audio bug. But in such a competitive segment, I’m not convinced this will be enough for Sonos to really stand out.
For the next generation, Sonos should lean into their core advantages: quality and connectivity. On the former, the sound quality needs to go beyond merely competitive into truly impressive with a greater attention to fidelity, and the noise cancelling needs to go up a notch too. I would take more weight for truly long-lasting battery life, which would also allow them to further connect into the Sonos ecosystem, hopefully including direct Wi-Fi streaming to the headphones. This is the trick that allows for lossless top-quality audio to play on their speakers, and they would have a seriously competitive edge if they became the first to pull that off on headphones.
