Sonos Ace review: Good sound, great design and clever TV play

A few days before the launch of the Ace in India, Sonos team had a conversation with tech journalists in Delhi. Talking to India Today Tech, Scott Fink, who is the Distinguished Product Manager at Sonos, explained Ace. He said that a pair of headphones has been the “most requested” new product by Sonos fans. Fink said, “Customers and our fans have been requesting headphones from Sonos for a very long time. That’s because they love our approach to design and ease of use and sound, and they wanted to see what our take would be on headphones.”
After using the Sonos Ace for over 10 days I now have a fair idea of what this take is. Sonos Ace is everything its fans expected, and then there are bits where it could have been better. But largely it is everything they expected from the first pair of headphones from Sonos. In particular, the Sonos ethos and signature is evident in its design, sound quality, and the interplay that the company is trying to achieve with its headphones and its soundbars.
The Ace is a premium product. The price, when compared to what Bose, Sony and Sennheiser ask for, is slightly on the higher side. Though Apple AirPods Max is significantly pricier in India. Irrespective, I think the price difference is justified simply because of the build quality. The Ace is built and designed better. The materials, including the shiny mirror-finish metal under the headband, oozes quality and slickness. The earcups are made of high-quality plastic. The headband and cups have memory foam padding, which is wrapped in vegan leather.
The Ace also has a heft to it which gives the confidence that it will take some beating and will not fall apart as you travel with it. Yet, it is not heavy on the head when you wear it, which is always good.
Keeping in line with Sonos ethos for minimalistic and modern design, the Ace sports minimalistic looks. Its cups are rounded, and have no unnecessary trimmings or flair to them. The left cup has one button, and on the right side there are two buttons. The paddings on the cups are removable — they attach to the headphones using magnets. This is clever and I hope more headphone companies will follow it because it makes changing the pads, whether for comfort or after they have worn out, so much easier. The mesh at the bottom of the pad is in two shades of grey — light and dark. The colours help users intuitively know the orientation in which they need to put on the headphones. Nifty!
Design and build is top class. What about comfort? My experience here as I wore the Ace hour after hour is mixed. The earcups, I believe, would be large enough for most users, but I would have liked the pads to be a bit wider. On the left cup, my ear lobe wasn’t fully covered and that made me readjust the cup every half an hour or so as I wore them. Of course, we all have different anatomies and the issue I faced does not mean everyone would face it. Overall I feel pads with larger openings would have been helpful.
The Ace, when put on, stays on securely. It does exert a little pressure through the earcups as well as with the headband. But it is not uncomfortable. Having said that, these are the headphones that most people will know they are wearing. They are not the kind of cans that, when you are wearing them for long, make you forget that you have them on your head.
Let’s talk about the buttons. I don’t like touch controls. Touch controls are not intuitive or precise in headphones. So I absolutely love that Sonos Ace has physical buttons. These buttons are easy to reach. The power on — also doubles as a pairing button — on the left is easy to use and intuitively placed. Though you do need to hold it for a second or two to turn on or turn off the cans. The round button on the right cup switches between active noise cancellation and transparency mode, which is excellent. But more about that in a while. The third button is unique. It can be slid up or down to reduce or increase the volume. It can also be pressed to play or pause the music. Slick and intuitive.
Overall, I think the Sonos Ace is one of the best built pairs of headphones in the market. To my eyes, it also looks the best and its design, with removable earpads and nifty buttons, is thoughtful and functional.
It also comes with a similarly well-designed case. Inside the case there is a pouch in which you can carry charging cable as well as the 3.5mm cable to use the Ace in the wired mode. The cables come with the Ace. The pouch attaches to the inside of the case with a magnet. Nifty and tasteful yet again!
Whenever I am reviewing headphones or audio products, I dread this part. Sound is such a subjective matter. It is as subjective and personal as taste and smell. And we all know how tricky it can be. Some people absolutely love blue cheese, some would be repulsed with its taste. Yet, let me try.
To figure out the sound on the Ace, I listened to music on it for hours, using it with an iPhone and MacBook. This music included all popular genres from 80s Rock to latest Taylor Swift Pop, from classical music of Verdi and Beethoven to metal classics like Enter Sandman. And everything in between. After hours of listening my one line observation is: the sound signature of the Sonos Ace is about pleasing all and offending no one.
What does this mean in real world experience is that the Ace sounds good with almost all genres. But it also doesn’t elevate the music listening experience in a way some specialised, or more specifically tuned, headphones might do for some genres.
The Ace is always in the middle. It’s in the middle while dealing with bass, keeping the thump and boom perceptible and tight. Those who love bass in their music would feel it in the Ace but will not be floored by it. Example: Sandstorm by Darude or Real Slim Shady by Eminem. I could get the beats with all that bass but it was also controlled. Similarly, the Ace keeps vocals in the middle. Listen to Whitney Houston’s I Will Always Love You or I Have Nothing and her pitch sounds balanced and clear but it also doesn’t soar high enough to shatter glass. And sometimes you want the music to shatter the glass. Same with the highs. Play Summer Presto by Vivaldi or Beethoven’s Ode to Joy and the Ace does a fine job but not the one which will make the music transcendental. In other words, sometimes you want the music to move you, but Ace with its default EQ doesn’t do it. It will make your ears enjoy different sounds in a song, without them going muddy or dull. But it is missing the punch, some warmth and expansive soundstage that some other headphones can generate.
It’s not a bad thing though. Sound, like a said, is a subjective experience. And as a pair of wireless headphones that wants to appeal to as large an audience as possible, the Sonos Ace carries with it a sound signature that handles most music genres well enough. In particular, it handles Bollywood, Pop and Rap extremely well. There are headphones that go extra big on bass, but in other types of songs they are terrible. Some, most notably the open-back headphones, have better range to deal with highs and expansive mids. But then they may sound uninspiring with pop and Bollywood music. The Ace is jack of all.
The Ace offers a few nifty tricks. And these tricks elevate the experience. For example, it supports wear-recognition. So if you take it off while listening to music, it automatically pauses the music. And when you wear it again, it starts playing again. The Ace also offers head-tracking for spatial sound, but in use I found the effect to be less pronounced than it is with something like Apple AirPods Pro 2, which is excellent on this count.
Sonos is a company that has made its name in the home audio segment with speakers and soundbars. It is no wonder that with the Ace it is also making a play for headphones that can be paired with a TV. There are two ways to use the Ace with a TV: the good old Bluetooth way and the handoff aka sound swap mode where you can switch the TV sound output between the Ace and a Sonos speaker like Beam 2 using the iOS app and the WiFi network. I was travelling during the last week due to the iPhone 16 launch so I have not been able to explore in detail the sound swap mode. But it is something I will update here after a few more days of use.
Now, I did use the Ace with my TV through Bluetooth and the sound output totally floored me. The signature sound that the Ace has, along with support for Dolby Atmos, greatly suits the sound mix used in movies and TV series. To test it, I used the Ace while watching Kaos, a Netflix show with some sharp dialogues and clever song overlays. It was a perfect experience, and definitely a big improvement over what I get with the Bose QuietComfort 35 II that I otherwise use while watching TV.
Given that the Ace was good enough with the music playback, has great noise cancellation — on this down below — and is fairly great with TV audio, this is a pair of headphones that I can confidently call all-rounder.
Well, no two ways about it: The Ace excels at noise cancellation. The headphones support three modes: active noise cancellation (ANC) on, transparency mode, and noise cancellation off.
The button on the right cup can cycle between ANC on and transparency mode. Through the Sonos app, you can also access ANC off. With ANC on, the Ace blocks out ambient noise in a thorough manner. Put them on and your noisy office colleagues would be muted. Wear them while travelling and the Ace cuts down traffic noise, or the sound from the airplane engine if you are in a flight, in admirable ways. So effective is the noise cancellation that once while I was watching Kaos with these headphones I did not hear the doorbell ringing in my house.
The transparency mode too is fairly great at what it does. Once turned on it allows in ambient sounds that have higher pitch, such as conversations, enabling you to talk even while wearing the headphones.
Battery life is another part of the Ace that is utterly fantastic. Sonos says that the Ace can last 30 hours and in my use I found it to be a rather conservative claim. Most of the time, for me the Ace lasted around 40 to 45 hours of active use, with use including music playback and TV sound output.
I would say yes. But do know that at Rs 39,999, these are expensive headphones. The reason why I would say that the Sonos Ace is worth the price is because it is an all-rounder. Its sound signature is tuned towards mids without being bland on the lower end. It does everything well enough, and some things — noise cancellation — it does in an excellent way. It is also, arguably, the best built and best designed pair of headphones under Rs 50,000.
That makes the Sonos Ace one of the best headphones you can buy in the market. Then there are nifty features like sound swap, which are useful if you have a Sonos soundbar. Even without it the Sonos Ace is excellent when paired with a good TV. And the battery life is truly amazing.
But like all things there is a “but”. If you go big on bass-heavy music, these are not the headphones for you. Similarly, these are not the headphones that will please purist audiophiles or those who are into classical music. The Ace doesn’t have the range to truly elevate the music. But then which wireless headphone has? Instead the Ace is a general purpose, carry-everywhere and use-with-everything headphone. And for this purpose it is, in my opinion, the best pair of headphones you can get at the moment in India.