After a Monday teaser, Sonos today unveiled its first headphones: the Sonos Ace, which take aim at high-end noise-cancelling wireless headphones like Apple's AirPods Max.
The Ace block out distracting noises by generating sound waves that actively cancel them out in addition to passively muffling them through the earpads. This feature is another first for Sonos, and faces some stiff competition from Apple and Bose with its QuietComfort Ultra headphones.
Motion tracking is built into the Ace, letting the headphones detect where your head is facing and adjusting the audio balance between the earcups for an immersive spatial audio effect. This follows in the footsteps of the AirPods Max and some other premium headphones with motion sensors, and can give a more effective sense of audio sources surrounding you than standard spatial audio processing on headphones.
(Credit: Sonos)The motion tracking and support for Dolby Atmos spatial audio play into the Ace's emphasis on providing an aural cinema experience. It can connect to the Sonos Arc soundbar, enabling wireless spatial audio streaming to the headphones. A button on the Ace switches the sound of whatever you're watching on your TV from the soundbar to the headphones, enabling private listening with surround sound.
Support for other Sonos soundbars including the Beam and the Ray are planned in the future, along with a TrueCinema room-scanning effect to improve the surround experience.
For music, the Ace relies almost entirely on Bluetooth. It features Bluetooth 5.4 and supports Qualcomm's Snapdragon Sound AptX for Lossless on phones with a compatible Snapdragon processor, and can play lossless audio through a wired USB-C connection as well.
Curiously, the Sonos Ace doesn't integrate into Sonos whole-home audio systems. Every Sonos speaker, including soundbars, can be assigned rooms and grouped together to allow seamless playback between those rooms through the Sonos app. Sonos' big claim to fame was offering one of the first major wireless multi-room audio platforms, but the Ace isn't a part of it. The Sonos app is only used to connect the Ace to your soundbar and to enable EQ adjustments and head tracking.
The Sonos Ace starts shipping on June 5 and will retail for $449.
Sonos also announced a follow-up to its Roam portable speaker, the Roam 2. It's a small, battery-powered speaker that can stream music from Bluetooth and Apple AirPlay, and integrate into a Sonos multi-room system over Wi-Fi. The Roam 2 seems almost identical to the original, though Bluetooth 5.0 has been upgraded to Bluetooth 5.2. It features hands-free Amazon Alexa, but unlike the first Roam it doesn't have Google Assistant; Sonos has stopped integrating Google's voice assistant into its speakers.
The Sonos Roam 2 is available now for $179.