New Products

It’s official. Sonos today announced its long-rumored entry into the competitive headphone arena with a high-end set of noise-cancelling wireless headphones designed with movie-watching in mind.

Slated to sell for $449 when they ship in early June, the new Sonos Ace headphones support Bluetooth 5.4 and make it easy to redirect TV audio from a compatible Sonos soundbar for a private home theater experience featuring spatial audio with Dolby Atmos and dynamic head-tracking. The company is also developing a new TrueCinema technology it plans to introduce later this year that “precisely maps your space, then renders…a listening experience so realistic you’ll forget you’re wearing headphones.”

Key features include a rated battery life of up to 30 hours with a 3-minute quick-charge mode that provides 3 hours of listening and active noise cancellation (ANC) with an Aware mode that lets you hear what’s going on around you. The right earcup has buttons for adjusting volume, controlling playback, answering calls, and switching between ANC and Aware modes, while the recently redesigned Sonos app provides access to controls for adjusting bass, treble, and loudness and turning head-tracking on or off; buttons for power and pairing a device are on the left earcup.

Sound is delivered through a pair of custom 1.6-inch (40 mm) drivers housed in earcups with a “ported acoustic architecture” designed to enhance bass, while eight beamforming microphones are used to control noise and keep voices clear during calls. To conserve battery power, wear-detection sensors pause the music when the headphones are removed and automatically resume playback when they’re put back on.

Available in black or white, the headphones are made of lightweight materials and use memory-foam cushioning in the headband and vegan-leather-wrapped earcups to ensure a comfortable fit during long listening sessions. Hinges that allow the headphones to fold flat for storage in the supplied travel case are hidden in the earcups so they don’t catch on hair. For more information, visit sonos.com.