It’s the company that lets you control all your audio from the one, unified app, almost completely regardless of where it came from. Apple Music, YouTube Music, Spotify, Audible, Deezer, iHeartRadio, and more than 100 different music, audiobook and podcast services can all be controlled through the one Sonos app on your phone, PC or tablet, and streamed via WiFi to any or all of your Sonos devices.
Any or all of your Sonos devices, that is, except the new Ace headphones.
You set up the headphones through the Sonos app, and you use the app to look at the headphone’s remaining battery life, but that’s about it.
Sonos Ace wireless headphones have a flat profile, which makes them more comfortable to wear when you’re lying down.
Other than the ability to redirect audio from a soundbar to the Ace headphones (a nifty feature for anyone watching TV late at night when others in the house are asleep, and for anyone watching a show such as The Wire with hard-to-understand dialogue), there’s no integration whatsoever between the Ace headphones and other Sonos products.
You can’t, say, start listening to something on your Sonos speakers, and then seamlessly keep listening on your headphones when you leave the house. You can’t play an audio stream on a Sonos speaker in one room, and on the Ace headphones in another.
You can’t even use the Sonos app to initiate audio playback in your headphones. You have to use other apps, like the Spotify app, to select music and then stream it via Bluetooth to your Sonos headphones: the same way other headphones operate, it’s true, but the opposite of what Sonos has stood for all these years.
The headphones do have a WiFi receiver in them for the soundbar functionality – which incidentally we couldn’t test because at launch it only supports one Sonos soundbar, the Arc, which we don’t have set up in our Labs – but Sonos has decided not to use that WiFi receiver as a way to let the Ace headphones participate in a Sonos system.
Dog’s breakfast
Frankly, we’re a little surprised Sonos even uses its main app to also control the new headphones, given how little of the app’s functionality works with the headphones, and especially given how completely Sonos had to overhaul its app just to accommodate the new headphones.
The overhaul is an utter dog’s breakfast. Core functions such as adding and removing Sonos speakers to and from an audio stream are now broken, and other features such as alarms and sleep settings are missing from the new version.
Of the many, many errors that we now get trying to listen to music on our Sonos multi-room system, the most perplexing is that it will now occasionally play two tracks from the same playlist – often the first track listed, plus the current track – on the same speakers at the same time. It’s nuts.
All that, just so we can check the battery life of the Ace headphones using the same app. Honestly, rather than release an overhaul to its app that was many months away from readiness, Sonos should have just introduced a temporary app just for the new headphones, and come out with the new, multi-room-speaker+headphone app when it was good and ready.
Maybe by then, it would have also figured out how to make the Ace headphones a first-class participant in the Sonos multi-room ecosystem, and given us the Sonos headphones we’ve all been waiting for.
However …
If you don’t think of the Sonos Ace headphones as a Sonos product, but as some standalone product from some new company that goes by the name of “Sonos” (which coincidentally is the name of the other legendary audio company, spelt backwards), then we have nothing but praise for these headphones.
That battery life that Sonos sullied its app and its reputation to keep you appraised of just goes on and on, as long as 37 hours of noise-cancelled music playback in our tests, which is second only to the superb Sennheiser Momentum 4 headphones we reviewed a couple of years ago.
The Sonos (spelt backwards) Ace headphones are nearly as comfortable as the Momentum 4 headphones, too, and with their flat-to-the-head profile, we suspect they’ll prove more comfortable than Momentums on long-haul flights, when you’re lying down in them. (We’re yet to take a long-haul flight with the Aces, but hope to remedy that soon.)
But what has really won us over with the Sonos Ace headphones are the buttons.
Where other headphones have hard-to-remember and even-harder-to-master tap, double-tap and triple-tap systems to control playback and noise cancellation, the Ace has big, ergonomic buttons and sliders to control things. Slide a button up for volume up, and down for volume down. Press the button down and playback pauses. It’s clean and simple.
Even the double button press (skip forward) and triple button press (skip backwards) work nicely. Not once in all our tests did we accidentally start, stop, rewind or fast-forward something we were listening to.
I can’t remember the last time I could say that.
Likes: Excellent headphones. Comfortable. Easy to use. Long battery life.
Dislikes: Sonos has destroyed its app. Not fully integrated with other Sonos speakers.
Price: $699