After years of rumours, Sonos has finally entered the headphone market with its over-ear headphones, the Sonos Ace.
These headphones are the company’s most requested product ever and it appears that no expense has been spared while making them. Notably, people who went hands-on with the earphones mention how comfortable and lightweight they are which are two major hurdles to overcome with over-ear headphones. In Canada, the headphones will retail for $599.
For controls, Sonos decided to eschew touch panels and instead loaded up the right ear with a pairing button and a multi-action-sliding ‘content key’ that can be pushed up or down to change the volume. You can also press on it to control playback and switch tracks as you’d expect from headphones.
Sonos has also made the inside of the right ear cup an offset colour making it easy to put on the headphones the right way. Inside the white version is a nice green colour, and inside the black, the right ear cup is grey. This is a small thing, but Sonos has always had a knack for designing good-looking products and the Ace headphones seem to follow that heritage.
On the spec side, Sonos didn’t slouch, either. The Ace headphones are filled with modern features like head-tracking, transparency, wear detection and more. You can even wirelessly connect the Ace to the Sonos Arc soundbar to beam audio from your TV to your headphones. Sonos said it’s working to bring this functionality to the Beam and Ray soundbars as well, but it will only work with the Arc at launch.
The headphones only work with the new Sonos App so holdouts not wanting to update will need to upgrade if they plan to get the new earphones. That said, this unlocks a lot of cool features and hopefully, it will evolve to include some interesting features that leverage Sonos’ existing audio ecosystem. At launch, they only really tie into the Sonos Arc for watching movies late at night.
In terms of standard specs, the headphones have Bluetooth multipoint so you can connect to two devices at once. There’s also an adaptive noise-cancelling mode that should allow ambient sounds through the earphones like car horns or people shouting near you. Sonos also says that it’s using high-end microphones to make sure that calls come through the new earphones really nicely.
Sonos Ace headphones are up for pre-orders today and cost $599 in Canada.
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