Sonos has made a bold entrance into the headphone market with the Ace, their over-ear noise-canceling headphones. Ace exudes premium quality from the moment you pick them up. Their debut offering sets a high standard in design and functionality, challenging the likes of Apple, Sony, and Bose for headphone supremacy.
Ace has most (but not all) of the features you’d expect with a few welcome surprises like lossless audio and a Sonos integration that lets you listen to your TV in full Dolby Atmos.
But are they worth the high price tag? Read on to find out.
Design
Sonos Ace screams “premium” with its simplistic and elegant design that combines matte finishes, stainless steel, and vegan leather. They feel more premium than Sony’s WH-1000XM5s, which feel plasticky in contrast. Ace has a sturdy build. They weigh 11.4 oz while Sony weighs 8.8 oz., and Apple’s AirPods Max weigh 13.6 oz.
Like most, the ear cups swivel flat for easier storage. The headphones don’t collapse for smaller and safer travel, which is an unfortunate trend lately. Our “soft white” looks particularly striking with its silver metal accents, and Ace is also available in matte black.
Sonos Ace excels with comfort. They may be the most comfortable of the competition while still offering a secure fit and good clamping. They strike the perfect balance — they clamp enough to wear at the gym, but not so much that they get uncomfortable. We wore them on multiple 6-hour flights and even slept with them — our ears never felt like a break. Ultra plush memory foam ear pads and a well-cushioned headband certainly help.
The ear cups are nicely angled to better fit your ear, so they’re deeper towards the back of your ear. We really liked this feature, and the angling helps you figure out which way to put them on. The plush ear cup cushions are fastened with a strong magnet, and they can be easily removed to replace or clean.
Unfortunately, there’s no IP rating for water or sweat. They seem fit for a bit of sweat, so we’d be careful with that.
Controls
Sonos opted for hard buttons and no touch buttons or gestures. Tactile buttons are great for good feedback and fewer accidental presses. One side of Ace has a power/pairing button. The other side has a noise control button and a neat slider control. The spring-loaded slider is for easily adjusting volume up or down.
You can also press the slider which plays, pauses, and skips tracks. A press-and-hold starts the TV Swap and seamlessly transfers your Sonos soundbar audio to your headphones. We like Ace’s buttons, but we would have appreciated some customization in the app.
There’s a built-in wear sensor that automatically plays and pauses music. This feature works perfectly.
Connectivity
Sonos Ace supports Bluetooth 5.4 with multi-point connections. You can pair and connect to 2 devices at the same time with seamless switching. There’s no standard 3.5mm port on the headphones, but Sonos includes a USB-C to 3.5mm cable so you can play from any device with a headphone jack.
They also include a USB-C-to-USB-C cable that can be used to listen to music from a phone or a laptop. Both wires support lossless playback, as does Bluetooth when connected to supported Android models.
Like Apple, Sonos offers an ecosystem for seamlessly playing music and connecting speakers. Naturally, Ace is part of the Sonos ecosystem. Today, you can play soundbar content through Ace headphones with “TV Audio Swap” and the Arc soundbar. Support is coming for the Sonos Beam and Sonos Ray.
Content can play in surround sound and even Dolby Atmos. The app allows you to enable Spatial Audio with or without head tracking. We were very impressed with how easy this experience was. There’s a one-time setup that takes a couple of minutes in-app and then all it takes is a button press on Ace.
If you’re watching TV, you turn Ace on, hold the volume slider, and in a second or two audio is transferred from the speaker to the headphones. It’s great not having to fiddle with a remote or an app.
App
The Sonos App is great for connecting Sonos devices to the ecosystem, but it’s limited to personalization and features. The one real feature of the Ace is an equalizer, but it’s just two bands (bass and treble) and a loudness toggle.
There are a few additional settings, like enabling head tracking or adjusting what wear detection does. Head tracking is gimmicky but it works well if you like it.
Battery
The Sonos Ace headphones offer an impressive 30 hours of playback with active noise cancellation enabled. Just a 3-minute charge will give you 3 hours of playback, which you can almost always find time for. Ace charges with the included USB-C-to-USB-C cable, or pretty much any USB-C cable.
Noise Cancellation
Sonos nails ANC right out of the gate. We think their noise cancellation is just as strong, clear, and natural as Sony’s best-in-class offering. They easily cut out most of the noise from public transportation, and there’s a dramatic difference when ANC is activated.
You can comfortably listen to music at lower volumes in loud environments. The hear-through ‘aware mode’ feature is one of the best we’ve used — it actually sounds like a natural pass-through instead of a messy digitized version of background noise.
Unlike Sony, Sonos doesn’t offer any noise management features. You can’t alter the intensity of noise cancellation or hear-through, and there’s no automated feature for switching between noise modes. Sonos also doesn’t provide a customized noise cancellation fit for your ears, but this didn’t matter much to us.
Sound
Out-of-the-box, the Sonos Ace sounds premium, high-fidelity, detailed, and just plain fun. Without tuning, they’re beautifully on par with the competition, subjectively speaking. Sonos offers excellent clarity and detail with a wide sound stage and good separation. On good recordings, you can easily hear the details of individual instruments.
It’s particularly enjoyable to listen to songs that utilize left and right channels, making you appreciate the intricate details and spatial effects in your music. The tuning is lively and well-balanced. The Sonos app offers EQ settings, but as of writing, there’s just a slider for bass, treble, and right/left balance.
There’s a “loudness” toggle for boosting bass and treble at low volumes, and we found this adds some welcome oomph for music at any volume.
The wide sound stage and precise imaging add a nice spatial effect to music, despite not featuring “Spatial Audio” for streaming music. The Sonos Ace offers Spatial Audio only when streaming from their compatible soundbar. Watching Atmos movies in 3D spatial audio is an impressive experience, and Sonos did a nice job with this.
It’s a shame that the iPhone can’t play Atmos content with non-Apple headphones, but we applaud Sonos for their solution.
There are 8 microphones to help with noise control and targeting. The call quality on Sonos Ace is good, but the background noise cancellation for calls isn’t as good as we had hoped for. We like how clear and natural our voice sounds, but it picks up background noise too easily.
Sonos Ace review: Final thoughts
With the Ace, Sonos has engineered an impressive pair of headphones, especially considering this is their first attempt. The Ace competes very well with established competitors, excelling in build quality, comfort, and overall performance.
However, they fall short in one key area: price. The Ace retails for $449, while Sony’s flagship WH-1000XM5 is currently available for $350 or less, and debuted at $400. Although the Sony flagship headphones are less expensive than Apple’s $549 AirPods Max, Apple justifies the premium with native iOS integration and exclusive features. Despite the higher price tag, we prefer the Ace for its superior fit, feel, and aesthetic compared to Sony.
Overall, if you value design, comfort, and seamless integration within the Sonos ecosystem, the Ace is a strong headphone contender worth considering. Sonos Ace is currently available from Amazon.com for $449 in black or white.