Sonos Ace review: stunning looks and audio from Sonos’ first wireless headphones
Past the hype, how do Sonos’ first-ever wireless headphones hold up?
Pros:
✅ 🧐 Fabulously designed and luxurious to wear
✅ 🎧 Warm, full soundstage with terrific bass accuracy
✅ 📺 TV Audio Swap gives you private surround sound for TV, movies, games, and more
✅ 🎮 Delivers atmospheric and directional sound for gaming
Cons
❌ 🔜 Forthcoming TrueCinema feature still coming later this year
❌ 🤑 TV Audio Swap only works with $800 Sonos Arc for now❌ 📱 TV Audio Swap can only be set up with an iPhone or iPad currently❌ 🤖 Android users punked with fewer features in the Sonos app
🏆 Review score: 5 out of 5
🏅Editor’s Choice
Updated August 7, 2024: Sonos has updated its Ace so that TV Audio Swap now works with Android and its more affordable soundbars. We’ve updated the score of this review from its original 4.5 stars rating to 5 stars.
Shortcut Review
The $449 Sonos Ace has looks to die for and sound quality that could kill. Seriously, the Sonos Ace is the most stylish pair of wireless headphones you’d want to be seen wearing outside. They’re eminently stylish with a unique silhouette and a dozen thoughtful and elegant touches throughout their design. Beyond looks, it delivers a warm, accurate, and bassy sound with fantastic noise-canceling to tune out the world.
At home, you can use the Sonos Ace as a pair of surround-sound headphones that work well for TV, movies, gaming consoles, PCs, and more. Its marquee TV Audio Swap feature lets you transfer any sound from a Sonos Arc sound bar to the headphones complete with spatial audio, head tracking, and Dolby Atmos surround sound.
Of course, not everything is roses and awesome about the Sonos’s first pair of headphones. Some features are only so-so like the transparency mode and microphone. Other elements of the Sonos Ace like TrueCinema is still cooking and will be served later this year. Still, the Sonos Ace gets more of the fundamentals right and it’ll be almost flawless once those outstanding features and compatibility with lower-priced sound bars are added. It’s an incredible debut for the brand’s first pair of headphones all told.
Full Review
🎨 Artisanally designed. The Sonos Ace is a masterclass in subtle design cues. It has so many little touches that elevate the headphones you’ll forget they’re mostly made of recycled plastics. All the gaps where the headset’s different materials meet are so small the headset might as well be seamless. Sonos added stainless steel inlays to both the headband and earpads so that the metal rails don’t rub against the plastic. Even the headband features an asymmetrical shape to remind you how to wear them.
💅 Très chic. The Sonos Ace are the most stylish and sleekest headphones right now. They’re sleek as all get out. The earpads hug close to your face with thinner earcups, while the metal arms and plastic headband look like they’ve been made as slim as possible. If you’ve ever hated how headphones with massive cans make you look like a wide-headed robot, the Sonos Ace has a much more flattering design.
🗜️ Serious clamping force. The clamping force of the Sonos Ace is strong enough to keep it firmly attached to your noggin without being too tight to give you a headache or pinch your ears. They haven’t come loose once even if I’m sprinting to a Manhattan bus that only arrives every 40 minutes or headbanging to heavy metal. On my rather larger head, they fit SNUG. I’m practically maxing out the flexibility of the headband so those with wider, Hey Arnold football-shaped heads might have trouble wearing this set of headphones
✈️ Comfort+. The Sonos Ace might have a tight fit on me but they feel luxurious. They’re practically weightless at 11.4 ounces. This is also largely thanks to the headphone’s weight being spread out along the wide, squishy cushion on the headband and the pillowy memory foam ear cushions. I can comfortably wear the Sonos Ace for a full workday plus streaming TV/movies through the night.
🎛️ Real switches at last. I had a little fist pump when the Sonos Ace debuted with buttons and a slider. Having only physical controls on headphones is refreshing and they all work beautifully. There’s a power button on the left while the right has one for switching between transparency and ANC modes. On the right, there’s also a content key you can slide up and down to change the volume. Pressing it in once, twice, or thrice triggers actions like pause/play, skipping a track, and repeating a track, respectively.
🎁 Fantastic case. Like the headphones themselves, the Sonos Ace’s case is stylish and well designed. Its slim and asymmetrical shape makes it look distinct. My favorite part is the magnetic pouch for cables. You can just plop it onto the inside of the case and its strong magnets will pull it into place. I also love how you squeeze open the pouch to grab or stow the 3.5mm audio and USB-C charging cables.
🎧 Gorgeous soundscape. The Sonos Ace sounds as beautiful as they look. I could hear all the tiny nuances in Fiona Apple’s Glory Box Now from the breathy lyrics, elegant strings, cacophonous guitar strums, and even the faint record scratches and pops. The Sonos Ace packs a warm, full soundstage with terrific bass accuracy. This sound profile breathes new life into songs like Long Time Gone and Here Comes the Sun. The bass is plenty present (though not as powerful as Sony’s) while listening to Nelly Furtado’s Promiscuous, in which I could hear and feel every bassy punch like a fist hitting a board.
🙂↔️ Head-tracking audio. If you want to make your music sound even more dynamic you can turn on spatial audio with head tracking. Strangely, the feature isn’t on by default but once you activate it you get directional audio while streaming music on your phone from Apple Music, Amazon Music, Tidal, and Deezer. It also works with TV and movie streaming apps as long as they support Dolby Atmos. It works just as promised and it’s pretty fun you can turn your head or dance around your phone like it’s a physical speaker system.
😌 Silence is golden. What else helps the Sonos Ace sound good is they have noise-cancelling built-in. The Sonos Ace does a great job of covering up loud noises like the contractor that’s been power-sanding my parent’s house for the last 1.5 weeks. While computing it also blocks out all the deafening metallic squeals on the train, but I could still hear the four kids with leashes running around the subway car. So while it’s fantastic at shutting out most of the world, it can’t perform miracles.
👂Radio hearing. When you want to hear the world around you, the Sonos Ace also features a handy transparency mode. It’s as clear as other transparency hearing modes I’ve experienced on the Sony WH-1000XM5, Apple AirPods Max, and Bose QuietComfort Ultra. However, it wouldn’t call it just as natural. There’s a hint of digitization, which makes it apparent I’m hearing the world around me through a microphone and speaker.
📺 TV Audio Swap. TV Audio Swap is the Sonos Ace’s marquee feature that lets you wirelessly transfer your TV audio from a Sonos Arc soundbar to the headphones. All it takes is a little setup in the Sonos app on an Apple or Android device. After that you can toggle it on whenever you’re watching TV by long pressing the Content Key button. Switching takes just a second and you can switch between piping audio through the soundbar or your headphones whenever you want.
🎥 Movie theater sound in your ears. Watching TV/movies with a 5.1 or Atmos surround mix makes the Sonos Ace all the more impressive. It is one of the only headphones that gives you cinematic spatial sound rather than just head-tracking sound like on the Apple AirPods Max. While watching the first Dune movie it was amazing to hear voices of Paul’s ancestral memories come from multiple directions like I was in Paul Atreides’ head myself. Then Dune 2 was a perfect showcase of how explosively powerful the bass of the Sonos Ace was in so many scenes with the nuclear explosion, the line of rampaging sandworms, and Paul shouting silence with his “voice.”
🎮 Hi-Fi gaming. As TV Audio Swap pushes any audio you would hear through your TV soundbar to your headphones, you can use the Sonos Ace for gaming too and they work great with the PS5 Slim. The Sonos Ace delivers the same atmospheric soundscape as I would hear from my Sonos surround system but directly into my ears. It worked especially well for atmospheric games like the (mostly) tranquil Japanese countryside in Ghost of Tsushima and the eerily dread in The Last of Us Part 1. The Sonos Ace also delivers powerful bass for shooters like Call of Duty, and you can pinpoint where enemies are thanks to its fantastic spatial sound.
🛜 Signal loss. While it’s amazing to hear true surround sound through the Sonos Ace, it’s not a flawless experience. Sometimes the audio pushed to the headphones will distort and crackle like there’s some drop in signal. It’s happened to me several times during testing even while I’m sitting directly in front of the soundbar. Sonos Arc and Ace establish a point-to-point Wi-Fi connection (48kHz sample rate and 345kbps bitrate) to power the TV Audio Swap feature, but it doesn’t seem very strong. It works well as long as you’re in direct line of sight, but as soon as you have a wall between you and the sound bar the signal will drop completely.
🔊 60% volume reset. Another odd behavior of TV Audio Swap is it will always reset the Sonos Ace’s volume to 60%. That means even if you adjust the volume of your headphones while watching TV, it will reset to 60% the next time you use TV Audio Swap. The same thing will happen if using the Sonos Ace at 45% volume, swapping the audio back to the soundbar, and immediately to the headphones again – the volume will reset to 60%. Sonos tells us, this is all by design as it “set[s] the volume loud enough for the user to know something is playing, but not so loud that it startles the user.” I would have preferred the Sonos Ace stay at the volume I set them to.
🔁 Bluetooth Multi-point included. The Sonos Ace’s last connection trick is it features Bluetooth Multipoint to connect to two sources simultaneously. There’s nothing revolutionary about this, it just makes connecting two devices and swapping audio between them easier. Just remember this feature is also disabled by default and you’ll need to enable it in the Sonos app.
🔜 Forthcoming features. Sonos also promised TrueCinema calibration will arrive by the end of the year. TrueCinema calibration is basically a next-level version of spatial sound that will tune the headphones to mimic the acoustics of your living space. The idea is to give you a sound experience that feels like you’re not wearing headphones at all, but instead, you’re hearing surround sound bouncing off your actual physical walls.
🔋 30-hour battery life. The Sonos Ace packs in 30 hours of battery life just like the Sony WH-1000XM5, and a little more than the Bose QuietComfort Ultra (24hrs) and Apple AirPods Max (20hrs). That’s more than battery life to get you through a round-way trip to Asia and back. The battery exhausts slightly faster while using TV Audio Swap since it’s pushing a constant Wi-Fi connection. Still, I could easily use the headphones for three long nights of TV watching before needing to be recharged. The headphones also feature 15W quick charging to give you three hours of listening time with just a three-minute charge.
Should you buy the Sonos Ace?
Yes, if…
✅ You want a pair of stylish headphones that are very comfortable to wear
✅ You already have a Sonos Arc and at least one mobile Apple device at home
✅ You want surround sound headphones for TV, games, movies, and more
No, if…
❌ You only have Android devices at home (or buy a cheap iPad with a deal)❌ You have a Sonos Beam Gen 1 or 2, or a Sonos Ray (hold on for updates and deals)
Kevin Lee is The Shortcut’s Creative Director and has been reviewing tech for more than a decade, including going in-depth on TVs and soundbars.
These would've been perfect. They have the looks (low profile yet distinct), usability (love the content button), Sound Quality (sound signature that you would expect from a Sonos), codec support , comfort in terms of weight and clamping, EXCEPT - the vegan leather/foam used for the earpads is not at all breathable and heats up the ears quickly. Look at what KEF MU7 has used - breathable vegan leather that actually works.
Great article. I picked up a pair right away and now I have some testing to do to decide if I like these or the AirPod Max better
I did try these with my Sonos Beam 2 and the audio swapping works seamlessly.