Called ‘Ace’, the new Sonos headphones have a wireless, active noise-cancelling, over-ear design - and they are priced to go up against the biggest hitters in the mainstream market. Which, for the avoidance of doubt, means mostly Apple and Bose.
The £449 price tag places them right at the upper edge of the mainstream, of course - and while I’m not surprised Sonos feels that’s where they belong, it does mean that the Ace has a weight of expectation on it - even without the lengthy wait for its arrival. After all, Bose has been a front-runner at this sort of thing since before Sonos was even born, and Apple is, well, Apple.
Mind you, the Ace is specified, as well as priced, to go toe-to-toe with these incumbents. Wireless connectivity is via Bluetooth 5.4, and as well as the usual SBC and AAC codecs the Sonos is compatible with ALAC and aptX Lossless too - so anyone fortunate enough to be in possession of an appropriate source player can enjoy CD-standard 16bit/44.1kHz resolution via Bluetooth. The 5.4 standard means LE Audio and Auracast should become part of the deal eventually, too.
Sound is delivered by a couple of bespoke 40mm dynamic drivers. As is usual, Sonos is not exactly forthcoming with the details regarding materials or frequency response - but it is prepared to admit that some ported acoustic architecture is deployed in an effort to achieve significant low-frequency extension.
Subscribers to appropriate streaming services will be pleased to find the Ace supports Sony 360 Reality Audio and Dolby Atmos spatial audio standards. In addition, Sonos’ ‘Intelligent Motion Processing’ with Dolby Head Tracking allows the audio presentation to adapt to the wearer’s head movement in an effort to provide the most complete sensation of audio immersion possible. As of right now, Sonos Ace can seamlessly interact with the company’s Dolby Atmos-enabled Arc soundbar to swap TV sound between headphones and soundbar at the push of a button - it’s a feature that’s sensibly enough called ‘TV Audio Swap’, and Sonos intends to make it available for its Beam, Beam Gen 2 and Ray soundbars soon. Also in the pipeline is ‘True Cinema’ technology, designed to map your listening space in order to reproduce the characteristics of your soundbar experience in the sound of the Ace.
Given a) the class-leading ecosystem on which Sonos has built its formidable reputation, and b) the length of time these headphones have apparently been in development, hopes were high that the Ace would feature as a ‘room’ in a Sonos set-up, but that’s not the case. Their wi-fi capability is restricted to the ability to swap sound back and forth with an Arc, and as it stands that’s your lot.
Battery life is a fairly standard 30 hours with active noise-cancellation switched on - by default, your options consist of ‘noise cancelling’ or ‘aware mode’, but delving into the depths of the control app allows you to add ‘off’ to the list of possibilities. Quick-charging means three minutes on the juice equates to three hours of listening, while ‘flat’ to ‘full’ takes around three hours. But while the Ace is supplied with 3.5mm-to-USB-C and USB-C-to-USB-C cables, these headphones cannot be used passively even when hard-wired. Listening requires power.
Sound quality
You’ll find out almost immediately you become acquainted with the Sonos Ace that it’s a consistent listen in virtually every circumstance. You can listen to compressed stuff via Apple or high-resolution content via a hard-wired connection to a digital audio player; you can listen to Dolby Atmos content from those streaming services that offer it or to the spatial audio sound of a movie that was, until moments before, being played through your Sonos Arc soundbar. At every turn, the Ace doesn’t alter its attitude in the slightest.
And that attitude is one of balance, insight and all-around good manners. From the top of the frequency range to the bottom, the Ace digs out plenty of detail, has plenty of pertinent observations to make about texture and timbre, and has an entirely naturalistic tonal balance that makes for a convincing listen.
Frequency response, from the deep, full-figured and properly controlled low frequencies to the brisk, substantial and shining top end, is even and smooth. The midrange communicates eloquently, and there’s more than enough insight into a vocalist’s technique to let you feel you’re getting the complete picture. The straight-edged manner with which the Ace approaches bass information means the headphones give rhythms and tempos confident expression.
The soundstage the Ace creates is spacious and properly organised - provided you’re listening to stereo content and have left the ‘head tracking’ algorithm switched off. There’s plenty of room for each element of even the most complex recordings to operate, but that’s not at the expense of a good sensation of unity. Music mixed in Dolby Atmos isn’t quite as well-defined, but then again it’s a fair bit more immersive than the stereo alternative. And when you deploy ‘TV Audio Swap’ with your Sonos Arc, the Dolby Atmos movie content it was playing translates to a nicely open, if not exactly explicit, spatial audio effect.
Whether or not you find the dynamic headroom adequate depends on where you stand on the word ‘polite’. Attack for its own sake isn’t an especially desirable trait in headphones, of course, but I think the Ace could be a little more assertive where the broad strokes of dynamism are concerned. Some recordings have a big difference between their quietest and loudest moments, and often switch between those two states in an instant - but the Ace doesn’t always make the contrast sound as great as it might.
As far as active noise-cancellation goes, these headphones would be on perfectly secure ground if Sonos hadn’t decided to bill them as ‘the world’s best’. The Ace can deal with the overwhelming majority of external sounds, and does so without shifting its sonic attitude or introducing any suggestion of counter-signal. But it doesn’t do a complete job on the ambient sound you’ll encounter on, say, a commercial flight - and given that there is at least one pair of similarly priced noise-cancellers that can, ‘world’s best’ is a bit optimistic. If only Sonos had gone with ‘really bloody good’ or something like that…
Living with
Living with the Sonos Ace is generally painless, and for quite a few reasons. ‘Comfort’ is a big one, and is as good a place as any to start.
At 312g, the Ace is no burden whatsoever to wear - and thanks to some very nicely judged clamping force and a sympathetic hanger arrangement, it remains comfortable even through the longest listening sessions. A judicious combination of vegan leather covering stainless steel and memory foam at the contact points doesn’t do any harm in this regard, either.
And for once, here’s a pair of over-ear headphones that don’t look oversized on a regular head and ridiculous on a smaller head. At 191x160x85mm (HxWxD) the Ace is notably low profile, and, unlike the majority of nominal rivals, the gap between the sides of the wearer’s head and the headphones themselves isn’t overly wide.
These headphones are available in either matt black or ‘soft’ matt white, and branding is restricted to a laser-etched company logo on one earcup. They look both understated and sophisticated.
Controlling the Ace can be done in a few different ways. Your source player’s native voice assistant is available - there are four beam-forming mics in each earcup that take care of those interactions, as well as telephony and active noise-cancellation. There are a couple of physical controls on the right earcup - one is for cycling through the Active Noise Cancellation (ANC) options or summoning your voice assistant, and the other (which Sonos is adamant is not a button but a ‘content key’) is a nicely weighted slide/push control. It puts you in charge of volume, play/pause, skip forwards/backwards and answer/end/decline call. A single button on the left earcup, just alongside the USB-C slot, deals with power on/off and Bluetooth pairing. The Ace, by the way, can be connected to multiple devices at once.
You can also use the latest, recently upgraded, version of the Sonos control app. The amendments unveiled during May 2024 haven’t met with universal approval - but where control of the Ace is concerned, the app remains fit for purpose. As well as playback controls and what-have-you, it allows you to switch ‘head tracking’ on or off, and investigate some rudimentary EQ controls (including, inexplicably, ‘balance’).
The Ace is supplied with an appropriately slender and tactile semi-hard case to keep its matt finish spiffy during transit. There’s a magnetically attached pouch inside for cable storage, and the entire arrangement is made from 75 percent recycled plastic bottles.
Conclusion
You might be disappointed by the inability of the Ace to become a complete part of a wider Sonos system, and that’s fair enough - but to ignore everything else it does so well on that basis would be a mistake. This is a very, very capable pair of headphones - and, what’s more, a pair of headphones that is compact and neat enough not to make you look like a ‘nana when you’re wearing them. And it’s hard to put a price on that…
Listening notes
Julia Holter Ocean
As an exercise in colour and texture, Ocean has hints of Eno in its evocative drones and Vangelis in its analogue rasp - but the shape of its lopsided lyricism is entirely Julia Holter. Where tonality and space in particular are concerned, Ace has it all to do here.
DJ Shadow Building Steam with a Grain of Salt
In which Josh Davis constructs an oddly cinematic and vaguely unsettling collage that presents a stern test of dynamics, detail retrieval and, most of all, rhythmic expression. Less capable headphones than these can easily trip over their own feet.
Jonny Teupen Love Me
Funkier and more danceable than any harp-led slice of late-60s jazz has the right to be, Love Me is a vibrant, hectic test of staging, focus and separation as well as being a shameless hip-shaker. Happily, these Sonos headphones are more than willing to get on down.
You want a well-specified and great sounding pair of headphones that's comfortable to wear and to listen to for long periods. And it looks right, too.
Obviously the ideal is a source of music that features aptX Lossless compatibility, but they are rarer than hen’s teeth just now. So, a nice capable smartphone (ideally Android with some aptX capability) is a great place to start. And having a Sonos Arc soundbar handy wouldn’t do any harm, either.
