After years of rumours, leaks, and teases, the Sonos Ace headphones have officially landed and look to take on industry stalwarts in the active noise cancellation and personal cinema audio game. This is the first wearable audio product from the company which will apparently “transform the way we listen on headphones.”
“They’re here! Fans have asked us for years to bring the Sonos experience to headphones – and we
knew our first foray into the category needed to champion the type of innovation and sound experience
Sonos has become synonymous with,” said Sonos CEO Patrick Spence.
The new cans feature a seemingly premium and minimalist over-ear design in keeping with the brand’s well-established aesthetic. “Endless comfort” is reportedly on offer with vegan-leather-wrapped memory foam earpads and a design that hides the hinges to keep them from pinching your hair. That means they won’t be able to contort inside their travel case but will fold flat, so at least there’s that.
Sonos Ace in the hole
The “custom-designed” 40mm dynamic drivers inside each earcup will blast high-fidelity sounds into your ears thanks to support for the hi-res wireless AptX Lossless codec. They connect via Bluetooth 5.4 which means SBC and AAC are your fall-back codecs if your device doesn’t support AptX.
Along with the drivers, each earcup also houses four microphones (three internal, one external) to cancel out external noise for their ANC feature and to improve call quality for both the phoner and phonee. They’ll also make it possible to hear what’s going on around you by switching to Aware mode.
Sonos’ headline feature here is something it calls True Cinema mode. This will allow the Sonos Ace to pair with a Sonos Arc soundbar (support for the Beam Gen 2, Beam, and Ray will come later) to send TV audio directly to the headphones over Wi-Fi for an immersive Dolby Atmos-enabled listening experience. Unfortunately, this feature will only be available to Sonos Arc-owning iPhone users at launch. Although support for Android devices is “coming soon”.
You’re looking at 30 hours of battery life (with ANC enabled) between charges and if you’re short on time, a quick three-minute charge will net you three hours of playback.
Other than the Android-less True Cinema mode, the only other drawbacks we can see so far are that you’re forced to use the new Sonos app for most of the headphone’s controls, adjusting EQ and the like, and the price. At R13,000 these are going to be out of reach for most folks. That is often the case with Sonos products which, for the most part, do a decent job at making it worth your while. We’ll reserve judgment on that until we’ve had them over our ears.
The Sonos Ace headphones will be available globally from 5 June 2024.