Lighter than Apple AirPods Max: Sonos aces its foray into headphones
It’s a crowded market, dominated by Apple, but that hasn’t stopped Sonos from delivering a sonic boom in its first attempt at making headphones.
I love learning new worlds. After being a journalist for 20 years, I’m still making daily discoveries.
So when I sat down to review Sonos’s first attempt at making headphones, I was eager to put my new word of the day to good use: krautrock.
It’s a term the British press coined to describe experimental rock music from Germany in the 1970s. (German musos preferred to call it kosmische musik or cosmic music.)
How it applied to the Sonos Ace – which retails at $699 – was upon wearing these headphones, I could see what a Rolling Stone journalist meant when he described the 2009 remaster of Magical Mystery Tour by The Beatles as transforming it from “a likeable psychedelic trifle to a heavy krautrock blow-out”.
Magical Mystery Tour wasn’t high on my list of The Beatles’ greatest music. But I have found myself listening to this track several times, wearing the Sonos Ace. It sounds different – certainly Ringo’s drums sound more punchy. The music is more alive.
Of course this is a combination of factors: better fidelity via streaming such as Apple’s Digital Masters (2009 iPod compression, while convenient wasn’t the best listening experience), speaker hardware and the advent of spatial audio.
Sonos makes the most of all these advancements with the Ace. When enabled, the Ace will adjust the spatial audio playback when you move your head, creating a sonic experience that you can lose yourself in.
But it’s not just old music. The National’s Laugh Track album, released last year, sounds more intimate, balancing Matt Berninger’s baritone vocals with more subtle instrumentation such as the soft strings.
A nice touch is the ability for the Ace to easily connect with Sonos’s Arc soundbar, enabling you to listen to your home theatre system through your headphones, and experience a thunderous cinematic blast.
The only letdown is Sonos’s app. It can be buggy. Content can sometimes fail to load for no apparent reason, even when you have a strong wi-fi signal. The interface can also be tricky to navigate, particularly when adjusting settings. To swipe back in the menu, you need to click an arrow in the top lefthand corner beside the Sonos logo, not swipe down, which will exit the menu.
But you don’t really need the app to use the Ace headphones. Once paired with your device, like an iPhone, you can listen to music seemlessly on Apple Music, Spotify or your streaming platform of choice. For the audiophiles, it comes with a cable for wired listening, which is a nice touch.
It’s taken the US company a long time to release these headphones in what has become a crowded market. Apple entered the space four years ago, releasing its AirPods Max over-hear headphones, which cost $200 more than Sonos’s. Apple also now owns Beats.
Bose has been making great gear for years, and Sony has a more affordable range that provides a pleasant listening experience. So why now for Sonos? Well, it’s what their customers wanted; and why not? Sonos needs a new product to sell after 2023 sales sagged about 22 per cent on the pandemic highs two years earlier. During lockdowns, people invested in audio systems among other home improvements, effectively pulling some of Sonos’s future growth, given its products last for years (my Sonos 5 and One are seven years old, and still going strong).
But headphones represent new growth opportunities. In the US alone, market research firm Circana estimates about $US2.2bn worth of headphones were sold last year – almost 50 per cent more than wi-fi audio speaker.
The Ace completes Sonos’s personal audio offering and it is a competitive and attractive package, available in black or white.
They are lighter than Apple’s AirPod Max, weighing 312 grams versus 384.8 grams – making them kinder on your head and neck. It’s comfortable enough to wear while taking phone calls, with beamforming microphones targeting your voice and suppressing background noise to provide extra clarity.
The noise cancelling is effective and blocks out ambient noise most of the time.
The design is also pleasantly minimalist, with a stainless steel headband that extends and stays in place, preventing slippage that can ruin the fit. The ear cushions are memory foam wrapped in faux or what Sonos calls vegan leather, but it feels soft enough and breathes.
The controls make sense. A button on the left side turns them on, while a button on the right below the volume control can turn the noise cancelling off – no morse code-like tapping required. The Ace also comes with a cable to listen to wired music, and says it offers 30 hours battery life. I’ve been listening to music and using them for calls for about a week and haven’t had to charge.
Now all I need is more kosmische musik on my playlist.
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