Sonos takes on Apple, Sony, with brilliant Bluetooth headphones

Setup is simple, as the headphones are ready to go as soon as you pair them with your phone. The default sound is roomy and well-defined, with a pleasant amount of bass, but you can use the EQ in the Sonos app to tweak it to your liking. Compared to my Sony WH-1000XM5s the Ace sounds wider and punchier, and I felt I could pick out individual instruments easier. I was also immediately impressed by the Ace’s performance in podcasts and calls, where some high-end headphones can become flat. Powerful noise cancellation lets you appreciate music on public transport or in busy places without having to jack up the volume, and a press of the button activates a transparency mode so you can hear people talking or cars approaching.

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Of course the music will only sound as good as its source, and in the case of Bluetooth headphones that means your phone, your environment, the apps you use and your internet connection all factor in. Sonos hasn’t really done anything unique to fix things here; a poor connection from an old phone or congestion on a peak hour train will still affect you.

And even the best headphones won’t make the murky world of hi-res lossless music codecs any clearer. Sonos says the Ace supports Apple’s lossless formats, and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Sound AptX Lossless. But you’re not going to benefit from them unless you’re using a wired connection or one of the extremely few supported Android devices, respectively, and to my ears the difference is so minimal that it’s not worth the effort.

The same can’t be said for spatial audio, however, which can make a dramatic difference to the way music sounds. I often find spatial mixes busy and overwhelming, especially on more compact speakers and buds like the AirPods Pro. But while a lot still depends on how the specific track has been set up, the Ace does an excellent job placing each sound and instrument in a specific spot within a wide field, whether that’s dance beats that swoop in from a distance or guitars that growl from the lower left while drums and keys take centre stage. Tracks mixed in Dolby Atmos or Sony 360 Reality are supported.

Works seamlessly with exactly one other Sonos speaker

The Ace packs in quite a few special features, some of which will be familiar to users of premium headphones (like the sensor that pauses music if you take it off), and some that are more unique.

A motion sensor (if turned on in the settings) tracks your head’s movement, so for example if you look to the left while listening to a spatial mix, the sound from the front will transition to your right ear. If you hold your head there for a few seconds it becomes the new default spot. It works well, even if it only really makes sense for close, stationary listening or movie watching.

And speaking of which, perhaps the Ace’s greatest trick is that you can pair it with a Sonos Arc soundbar and pass the audio back and forth with the press and hold of a button on the cup. Connecting Bluetooth headphones to TVs generally makes for a less than ideal experience, but here you get great, low-latency sound from any app or device that would usually output from your soundbar, and Atmos is still supported. For solo late-night movie-watching, it’s great.

Unlike most Sonos products, the Ace doesn’t connect to Wi-Fi and integrate with your other devices in a whole-home audio setup. It does show up in the Sonos app where you can set your preferences and EQ settings, but it’s more or less isolated from the other speakers. Even with the headphones connected to your phone via Bluetooth, you can’t play music on them via the Sonos app or easily move music from speakers to your cans. In more than a few cases, the app told me it couldn’t detect the headphones at all, despite them being connected and working normally.

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Niggles with the app will hopefully be resolved by future updates though, with Sonos saying it also plans to expand the Ace’s home theatre experience in future with support for the Beam and Ray soundbars, and a tool called TrueCinema that will make spatial audio streamed from the soundbar more realistic. Expansion to older devices like the Playbase or Sonos Amp seems unlikely though.

Overall, Bluetooth headphones are a new direction for Sonos and I’m not surprised there’s a small amount of friction with the rest of its ecosystem which until now was purely focused on connected speakers. But taken on its own merits the Sonos Ace is an incredible set of headphones that stands up to the category leaders while also carrying many core tenets of the Sonos brand; it sounds great, looks great, costs a lot, pushes the boundaries for personal music and works best if you have other Sonos gear.

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