After becoming a fixture in home audio and eventually branching out to portable speakers, it was only a matter of time before Sonos joined the headphone game. The company has done just that with the new $449 Sonos Ace, a premium set of over-ear headphones designed to bring Sonos’ signature style, sound and smarts to a slim set of speakers you wear on your head.
The Sonos Ace are undeniably attractive, and their wealth of features — including the ability to sync up with your Sonos soundbar — are certainly intriguing. But are they worth throwing down a preorder for their hefty price? Here’s what we think after getting some early ears-on time with Sonos’ long-awaited headphones debut ahead of their June 5 release date.
Available for preorder now and shipping June 5, the Sonos Ace are a premium set of headphones with a gorgeous design, promising audio quality and some neat compatibility with select Sonos soundbars.
Attractive looks with sound to match
It may be early, but I can confidently say that the Sonos Ace are some of the most attractive headphones I’ve gotten my eyes and ears on. Their sleek frame is befitting of a Sonos product, with clean, matte ear cups and a plush headband held together by a sliver of an aluminum frame — kind of like a more understated AirPods Max. I especially appreciated how thin and flush the ear cups are, since I generally find over-ear headphones to look comically giant on my dome. (They also fold flat and come in a notably slim carrying case for easy transport.) There’s a single Sonos logo that sits on the right ear cup so you can easily tell which way to put the headphones on, which I found to be a nice touch.
The headphones looked great in Sonos’ usual black and white, though I would love to eventually see the Ace get some of the more fun colors that made their way to the Sonos Roam portable speaker. Fortunately, the Ace feel as good as they look, with memory foam ear cups and a featherlight 11-ounce frame that felt pleasantly unobtrusive during my demo sessions. But perhaps my favorite thing about the Ace’s design are the physical controls.
The headphones feature a unique volume slider that Sonos says is inspired by “legacy audio equipment,” with springy, tactile feedback every time you move the slider up or down to control volume and a satisfying click when you press it to pause or play. As someone who hates wrestling with finicky touch controls (something not even the best headphones are immune to), I was very pleased by how easy the Ace were to navigate with my hands.
They also sound pretty dang good. Their custom-designed drivers made Ed Sheeran’s hit bop “Shivers” sound lively and balanced, allowing me to hear each individual instrument and vocal track clearly while pumping out bass that was present but not overpowering. The Ace impressed even more on Billie Eilish’s “What Was I Made For?”, preserving every detail of her breathy, heart-shattering vocal performance as if she were in the room next to us while still leaving space for the soft piano and subtle harmonies. Sonos also showed off the headphones’ head-tracked spatial audio chops with Breland’s “Praise the Lord,” where I could pinpoint the guitar, vocals, keyboards and subtle bits of percussion all coming from different directions — and staying fixed in place when I moved my head around, just like you’d hear at a concert.
I was even more impressed by the Ace’s active noise cancellation, which made a bustling demo room — one that was playing white noise out of a set of speakers no less — sound eerily silent. Their Aware mode was likewise reliable, bringing the chatter and airplane-like static back to the forefront with the push of a button.
Intriguing home theater smarts
The whole hook of Sonos products is that they work seamlessly with your other Sonos products, and the Ace are no exception. If you own a compatible Sonos soundbar, you can sync your Ace headphones up with them and switch audio between the two sources with the press of a button. This isn’t a feature I find especially groundbreaking, but I can see it being useful if, say, you need to suddenly switch from soundbar to headphone mode once the rest of the family goes to bed. The feature worked as advertised in my testing and certainly seems more convenient than having to manually pair and re-pair things once it’s time to put headphones on.
But the more intriguing feature being promised here is TrueCinema, which uses your soundbar to map whatever room you’re in and create a custom surround sound profile for your headphones. It’s an ambitious promise for those already in the Sonos world, and I’ll be curious to hear how TrueCinema sounds compared to the out-of-the-box experience once it arrives in a software update shortly after release. The Sonos Ace will be compatible with the Sonos Arc soundbar at launch, with support for the Beam Gen 2, Beam and Ray to follow.
Another quick compatibility note: Unlike most other Sonos products, the Ace has no Wi-Fi compatibility and doesn’t need to be set up via the Sonos app (though you can use the app to play with certain features like a sound equalizer and head tracking).
The takeaway
Based on our early hands-on time, Sonos’ first foray into the headphone space is an extremely promising one. The Ace have the potential to be some of the best-looking, best-feeling and best-sounding headphones we’ve tested, and their home theater functionality could make them the way to go for folks already rocking a Sonos soundbar.
The Ace’s steep $449 price tag isn’t unheard of for this type of headphone — the AirPods Max tend to hover between $430 and $550 — though our top overall pick in the Sony WH-1000XM5 are available for as low as $328 these days. The question is this: Are you willing to pay up for superior style and some potentially niche compatibility with your Sonos home theater? We’ll have a much better answer for that once we properly review the Sonos Ace against the competition, so stay tuned.
