19 hours ago
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✅ 🧐 Fabulously designed and luxurious to wear
✅ 🎧 Warm, full soundstage with terrific bass accuracy
✅ 🚫 Industry-leading noise-cancelling technology
✅ 📺 TV Audio Swap gives you private surround sound for TV, movies, games, and more
✅ 🎮 Delivers atmospheric and directional sound for gaming
✅ ılılı TrueCinema envelops you in a 3D spatial audio space
❌ 🎙️ Microphone quality isn’t the best
❌ 👾 Transparency mode sounds noticeably digitized
❌ 😣 TV Audio Swap volume defaults to 60% every time
Even a year after Sonos debuted its first wireless noise-cancelling headphones, the Ace continues to impress. The $329 Sonos Ace has looks to die for and sound quality that could kill. Seriously, the Sonos Ace is the most stylish pair of wireless headphones you’d want to be seen wearing outside. They’re eminently stylish with a unique silhouette and a dozen thoughtful and elegant touches throughout their design. Beyond looks, it delivers a warm, accurate, and bassy sound with fantastic noise-canceling to tune out the world.
At home, the Sonos Ace can be used as a pair of surround-sound headphones that work well for TV, movies, gaming consoles, PCs, and more. Its marquee TV Audio Swap feature lets you transfer any sound from almost any Sonos sound bar to the headphones, complete with spatial audio, head tracking, and Dolby Atmos surround sound. Plus, they offer the strongest noise-cancelling out of any wireless headphones I’ve tested.
📉 Lower price (for now). For months, the Sonos Ace headphones have been available with a consistent discount, lowering their price from $449 to $329. That makes them noticeably more affordable than the new $449 Sony WH-1000XM6 and $479 AirPods Max.
Of course, not everything is roses and awesome about Sonos’ first pair of headphones. Some features are only so-so, like the transparency mode and microphone quality. Still, the Sonos Ace gets more of the fundamentals right. It’s almost flawless now that all its features work as promised, and the Ace is compatible with Sonos’ lower-priced sound bars. It’s been an incredible debut for the brand’s first pair of headphones, and the Sonos Ace has only continued to get better with time.
🎨 Artisanally designed. The Sonos Ace is a masterclass in subtle design cues. It has so many little touches that elevate the headphones, you’ll forget they’re mostly made of recycled plastics. All the gaps where the headset’s different materials meet are so small that the headset might as well be seamless. Sonos added stainless steel inlays to both the headband and earpads so that the metal rails don’t rub against the plastic. Even the headband features an asymmetrical shape to remind you how to wear it.
💅 Très chic. The Sonos Ace is the most stylish and sleekest headphones right now. They’re sleek as all get out. The earpads hug close to your face with thinner earcups, while the metal arms and plastic headband look like they’ve been made as slim as possible. If you’ve ever hated how headphones with massive cans make you look like a wide-headed robot, the Sonos Ace has a much more flattering design.
🎛️ Real switches at last. I had a little fist pump when the Sonos Ace debuted with buttons and a slider. Having only physical controls on headphones is refreshing, and they all work beautifully. There’s a power button on the left, while the right has one for switching between transparency and ANC modes. On the right, there’s also a content key you can slide up and down to change the volume. Pressing it in once, twice, or thrice triggers actions like pause/play, skipping a track, and repeating a track, respectively.
🎁 Fantastic case. Like the headphones themselves, the Sonos Ace’s case is stylish and well-designed. Its slim and asymmetrical shape makes it look distinct. My favorite part is the magnetic pouch for cables. You can just plop it onto the inside of the case, and its strong magnets will pull it into place. I also love how you squeeze open the pouch to grab or stow the 3.5mm audio and USB-C charging cables.
🎧 Gorgeous soundscape. The Sonos Ace sounds as beautiful as it looks. I could hear all the tiny nuances in Fiona Apple’s Glory Box Now from the breathy lyrics, elegant strings, cacophonous guitar strums, and even the faint record scratches and pops. The Sonos Ace packs a warm, full soundstage with terrific bass accuracy. This sound profile breathes new life into songs like Long Time Gone and Here Comes the Sun. The bass is plenty present (though not as powerful as Sony’s) while listening to Nelly Furtado’s Promiscuous, in which I could hear and feel every bassy punch like a fist hitting a board.
🙂↔️ Head-tracking audio. If you want to make your music sound even more dynamic, you can turn on spatial audio with head tracking. Strangely, the feature isn’t on by default, but once you activate it, you get directional audio while streaming music on your phone from Apple Music, Amazon Music, Tidal, and Deezer. It also works with TV and movie streaming apps as long as they support Dolby Atmos. It works just as promised, and it’s pretty fun. You can turn your head or dance around your phone like it’s a physical speaker system.
😌 Silence is golden. What else helps the Sonos Ace sound good is that they have noise-cancelling built in. The Sonos Ace does a great job of covering up loud noises like the contractor that’s been power-sanding my parents’ house for the last 1.5 weeks. While commuting, it also blocks out all the deafening metallic squeals on the train, but I could still hear the four kids with leashes running around the subway car. So while it’s fantastic at shutting out most of the world, it can’t perform miracles. Otherwise, the Sonos Ace also specializes in blocking out low-frequency noises like airplane cabin buzz during flights.
👂Radio hearing. When you want to hear the world around you, the Sonos Ace also features a handy transparency mode. It’s as clear as other transparency hearing modes I’ve experienced on the Sony WH-1000XM6, Apple AirPods Max, and Bose QuietComfort Ultra. However, it wouldn’t call it just as natural. There’s a hint of digitization, which makes it apparent I’m hearing the world around me through a microphone and speaker.
📺 TV Audio Swap. TV Audio Swap is the Sonos Ace’s marquee feature that lets you wirelessly transfer your TV audio from a Sonos soundbar to the headphones. All it takes is a little setup in the Sonos app on an Apple or Android device. After that, you can toggle it on whenever you’re watching TV by long-pressing the Content Key button. Switching takes just a second, and you can switch between piping audio through the soundbar or your headphones whenever you want.
🎥 Movie theater sound in your ears. Watching TV/movies with a 5.1 or Atmos surround mix makes the Sonos Ace all the more impressive. It is one of the only headphones that gives you cinematic spatial sound rather than just head-tracking sound like on the Apple AirPods Max. While watching the first Dune movie, it was amazing to hear the voices of Paul’s ancestral memories come from multiple directions, as if I were in Paul Atreides’ head myself. Then Dune 2 was a perfect showcase of how explosively powerful the bass of the Sonos Ace was in so many scenes, with the nuclear explosion, the line of rampaging sandworms, and Paul shouting silence with his “voice.”
🎮 Hi-Fi gaming. As TV Audio Swap pushes any audio you would hear through your TV soundbar to your headphones, you can use the Sonos Ace for gaming too, and they work great with the PS5 Pro and Nintendo Switch 2. The Sonos Ace delivers the same atmospheric soundscape as I would hear from my Sonos surround system, but directly into my ears. It worked especially well for atmospheric games like the (mostly) tranquil Japanese countryside in Ghost of Tsushima and the eerie darkness in The Last of Us Part 1. The Sonos Ace also delivers powerful bass for shooters like Call of Duty, and you can pinpoint where enemies are thanks to its fantastic spatial sound.
ılılı Surround sound all around. TrueCinema mode arrived in June 2025 – several months later than initially promised by late 2024 – but it’s a fantastic feature that creates a virtualized 3D spatial audio space. TrueCinema on Sonos Ace allows the headphones to mimic the acoustics of your living space, giving you a sound experience akin to being in a room full of speakers. Although I’m still wearing headphones, it creates an “open-air” aural experience where I can hear surround sound bouncing off the physical walls around me.
🛜 Signal lock. In my extended year-long testing, the Sonos Ace maintains a strong Wi-Fi connection (48kHz sample rate and 345kbps bitrate) with Sonos soundbars. The wireless signal between the Ace and Arc was originally finicky, but software updates have significantly improved its connectivity. Now, I rarely experience any kind of interruption with TV Audio Swap, so that I can stay immersed in movies and games. While connected to the Sonos Arc, I can go into a different room, outside my apartment, and even go one floor down without disconnecting from the soundbar.
🗜️ Serious clamping force. The clamping force of the Sonos Ace is strong enough to keep it firmly attached to your noggin without being too tight to give you a headache or pinch your ears. They haven’t come loose once, even if I’m sprinting to a Manhattan bus that only arrives every 40 minutes or headbanging to heavy metal. On my rather larger head, they fit SNUG. I’m practically maxing out the flexibility of the headband, so those with wider, Hey Arnold football-shaped heads might have trouble wearing this set of headphones.
✈️ Comfort+. The Sonos Ace might have a tight fit on me, but it feels luxurious. They’re practically weightless at 11.4 ounces. This is also largely thanks to the headphone’s weight being spread out along the wide, squishy cushion on the headband and the pillowy memory foam ear cushions. I can comfortably wear the Sonos Ace for a full workday plus streaming TV/movies through the night.
🎙️ SideTone microphone monitoring. Ever catch yourself yelling during a call with noise-cancelling headphones? That won’t happen with the Sonos Ace thanks to its SideTone feature, which lets you hear yourself talk while on calls. SideTone almost sounds completely natural while still cutting out (or lowering) outside noises. You can be confident that how you hear yourself sound is how you’ll come across on the call.
🗣️ The mic is mid. As great as SideTone is, the actual microphone quality swings between okay and bad. The voice capture of these headphones sounds very digitized. The noise-cancelling mics can also sometimes do too good of a job of cutting through noise and can actually cut out my words on a call.
🔊 60% volume reset. Another odd behavior of TV Audio Swap is that it will always reset the Sonos Ace’s volume to 60%. That means even if you adjust the volume of your headphones while watching TV, it will reset to 60% the next time you use TV Audio Swap. The same thing will happen if using the Sonos Ace at 45% volume, swapping the audio back to the soundbar, and immediately to the headphones again – the volume will reset to 60%. Sonos tells us, this is all by design as it “set[s] the volume loud enough for the user to know something is playing, but not so loud that it startles the user.” I would have preferred the Sonos Ace to stay at the volume I set them to.
🔁 Bluetooth Multi-point ready. The Sonos Ace’s last connection trick is that it features Bluetooth Multipoint to connect to two sources simultaneously. There’s nothing revolutionary about this; it just makes connecting two devices and swapping audio between them easier. Just remember this feature is also disabled by default, and you’ll need to enable it in the Sonos app.
🔋 30-hour battery life. The Sonos Ace packs in 30 hours of battery life, just like the Sony WH-1000XM6, and a little more than the Bose QuietComfort Ultra (24hrs) and Apple AirPods Max (20hrs). That’s more than battery life to get you through a round-trip to Asia and back. The battery exhausts slightly faster while using TV Audio Swap since it’s pushing a constant Wi-Fi connection. Still, I could easily use the headphones for three long nights of TV watching before needing to be recharged. The headphones also feature 15W quick charging to give you three hours of listening time with just a three-minute charge.
✅ 🎧 You want a pair of stylish headphones that are very comfortable to wear
✅ 🎥 You already have a Sonos Arc and at least one mobile Apple device at home
✅ 🎮 You want surround sound headphones for TV, games, movies, and more
✅ 🚫 Blocking out sound with the strongest noise-cancelling is a must for you
✅ 📽️ You want to experience Sonos’ exclusive “open-air” listening with TrueCinema
❌ 🐦 A natural-sounding transparency mode is paramount for you (get the AirPods Max instead)
❌ ☎️ You take calls with your wireless headphones (get the Sony WH-1000XM6 instead)
Kevin Lee is The Shortcut’s Creative Director. Follow him on Twitter @baggingspam.
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English (US) ·