None are quite as convenient to actually use, though, as Sonos’ approach. The company made its name by doing complicated stuff — like synchronizing the audio across multiple speakers — while making it all look easy, and Ace’s integration with Arc has that same polish. Hold down the Content Key for a few seconds and suddenly the TV’s audio is coming through your headphones. Hold the button down again, and it swaps back. There’s no pause, no volume weirdness, and no sync interruption with what’s on-screen.
There are, beyond the initial sole compatibility with Arc, some limitations. Biggest is that, currently, only one set of headphones can be used: Forget about parents both watching a movie with their own set, while the kids sleep blissfully undisturbed upstairs. There’s also no way to control Ace’s TV Audio Swap from the soundbar itself, only from the headphones or in the Sonos app, and for now you’ll need an iOS device for the initial setup (though not to use TV Audio Swap after that; Sonos says Android setup support is coming). Ace relies on proximity and some other smarts — like which soundbars are currently active — to figure out which you want to grab the audio from; with only one Arc on hand, I couldn’t test how well that works.
Sonos may call it TV Audio Swap, but anything routed into the soundbar — whether from a laptop, a games console, or another source — works just the same. If you’re streaming music (such as from Spotify or Apple Music) to the soundbar through Sonos’ app, though, that won’t switch over to Arc. Instead, pressing the Content Key will switch the soundbar back into TV HDMI mode.
