Sonos Ace Review: Great for TV, But Not Much Else
Sonos Ace Review: Great for TV, But Not Much Else
Its sound profile makes the Ace a bad choice for music.
I genuinely thought I’d need more time to really settle in with the Sonos Ace headphones but it turns out its biggest flaw made me not want to really use them anymore (more on that later, obviously).
Which sucks because the Sonos Ace was a set of headphones I was really looking forward to getting my hands on. I’ve been a proud and happy owner of the Sonos Arc soundbar, paired with the Sonos Sub and a pair of Sonos Era 300s for a number of years now. It’s probably the best soundbar out there sans the Nakamichi Dragon. The Arc is the best compromise between great sound and tech features.
Regrettably, I think the Sonos Ace should be avoided, despite its price tag and feature set. They took a jab at it and I don’t think it played out like the company hoped.
Not much has changed since I wrote my first impression. So to avoid rehashing the same points, you can read that here.
So without further ado, let’s dive into my review of the Sonos Ace headphones.
Sound Quality
I hate to start with the negatives but this one is so big that I think it warrants going first.
Its biggest pitfall is its sound quality and lack of sound customization. Subjectively the Ace has a great soundstage but the longer I listened to the headphones, the more I realized how poor the detail retrieval actually is. Pile on top of the fact that the frequency response isn’t tuned to be fun (V-shaped) or neutral and there’s no real way to get it to sound like either without third-party hacks.
For my frequency response nerds out there (I’m one of y’all too): The bass has a notable sub-bass bump and upper-bass bump, leaving the mid-bass suppressed. There’s a good amount of upper-bass to lower-mid bleed that leads into a relatively recessed midrange entirely. In terms of treble, the ear gain region (lower treble) seems to be missing entirely, while the 7-8K region is pushed forward making vocals and things such as hi-hats sound harsh and sharp.
Meanwhile, the Sonos app only has two EQ options: a "Bass" and a "Treble" slider. So no matter what you do, you can’t tame that treble peak nor can you flatten out the bass. Bass isn’t too bad as some may actually prefer the bass response. At the end of the day, a recessed mid-bass isn’t that big of a deal for most. But the treble peak is something that’ll fatigue most people’s ears within an hour or so of listening. You can "solve" this by cranking down the treble, but then you get an even darker headphone with even less detail.
I’ve tried pulling the Ace into something like Roon with a proper parametric equalizer (PEQ) and trying to flatten out the curve does not work. The Ace’s drivers can’t deliver the detail in the top end. If anything, doing so narrows the soundstage and crushes micro details even further. With certain tracks, I was able to get the Ace to distort trying to add ear gain back into the mix.
And to be fair, I understand that active noise cancellation and sound quality don’t typically go hand-in-hand. But the fact that all of the other top players flat out sound better than the Sonos Ace by a sizable margin is sad to see, especially at its MSRP. Similar to how you’d expect Apple to nail the technology aspect (they did) in their headphones, I was hoping Sonos would nail sound quality.
The one upside is that the extra bass boost works really well for movies and TV shows. The treble peak is still annoying for any sort of dialogue. This is where the Ace absolutely shine. It works best when paired with the Sonos Arc for lossless audio and low latency. But it’s great even if you pair it to your phone or computer over Bluetooth. In that specific case, I could see carrying the Sonos Ace for travel.
(Un)fortunately, Everything Else Is Great
Sound quality is definitely the elephant in the room. It sucks because I practically love everything else about the Ace. As I mentioned in my first impression, I find the content key brilliant, the buttons for ANC/Awareness and on/off are tactile and easy to press and discern from one another. My only small gripe is that the press and hold to de/activate TV audio swap is about a beat too slow.
But what hurts the most is the Ace is so freaking comfortable. I can’t get over how comfy they are. I was able to wear them for 10 hours straight with no issue. I could easily see myself wearing the Ace for 15+ hour flights. I like that the ear pads are replaceable. That’s always a win in my book as those are typically the first thing that needs replacing when it comes to headphones. Battery life has been great as well, averaging 30 hours on a single charge. I’m charging the headphones about once a week.
In my testing in loud environments, the Ace’s microphone quality while on a call is pretty good. It’s still a Bluetooth headphone so you still get some compression but the other person can hear you regardless of how loud the environment is. It’s good enough for other people to hear you, but it’s still nowhere near wired microphone quality.
Noise cancelling is top tier. Not quite as good as the Bose QC Ultra, but better than the Sony XM5 and definitely better than the AirPods Max. Awareness/Transparency is where the Ace truly shines, only bested by the AirPods Max. As I mentioned in my first impression, I typically don’t use transparency mode because it’s trash on most headphones. The Ace is one of the few exceptions. With only a small bit of treble peak (likely due to the normal treble peak in the EQ), the transparency mode is one of the best I’ve ever heard. I can carry full conversations with the Sonos Ace on my head. Likewise, I actually enjoy walking around the city with the Ace’s transparency mode enabled.
The only real complaint I have about the Sonos Ace’s transparency mode is that I’ve gotten used to adaptive transparency with other headphones where they’ll mix ANC in with transparency so you can still hear what’s important around you while still blocking things out like engine noises or jackhammers. I wish the Ace had an adaptive mode or a way to tweak how much noise you want to let in with its transparency mode. On an airplane, I don’t need to hear its engine noise but want to hear announcements and flight attendants. But if you’ve never experienced adaptive transparency, the Ace is perfectly usable.
Design and looks are subjective but I’ve been a really big fan of how the Ace looks. I have them in the soft white colorway and it looks fantastic. The headband and ear pads are made of vegan leather with a stainless steel yoke. Unlike AirPods Max which uses aluminum ear cups, the Ace sub its cups for plastic. I think that’s perfectly acceptable to reduce weight. It’s been well documented that the AirPods Max are some of the heaviest noise cancelling headphones on the market. Again, the Ace is insanely comfortable.
Conclusion
The Sonos Ace was a set of headphones I came in hoping I’d love by the end of it. Unfortunately, unless you exclusively use the Ace for movies and TV, I can’t reasonably recommend them. You can get better noise cancelling for cheaper. And while sound quality is subjective, I can’t in good faith say that the Sonos Ace sound good. They don’t.
And it really hurts for me to say. Because practically everything else about the product is fantastic. But to repeat it one last time—that just sucks. Because even if I could apply a PEQ through Roon, that doesn’t carry through to other applications. If could use SoundSource on my Mac, but that’s the same problem. It only applies to my Mac. Sonos has its own basic EQ in their app that applies to the headphones directly but that is nowhere near nuanced enough to solve for the Ace’s glaring frequency response issues.
My only other small complaint is the travel case. While thin, the zipper tends to get stuck on itself, requiring a few minutes of fiddling to get the zipper out of the inside of the case. And it requires you to push the headband all the way down. Not a huge deal as you can always buy a different case (as I did) and that’s an easy solution.
Sonos has no influence on what I’ve written in this review. However, if the next iteration of the Ace, whatever it may be called, can really focus on improving sound quality and nothing else, I’d love to give that variant a shot. It’s been quite a long time since I’ve genuinely been disappointed in a product.
But for now, I’m returning the Sonos Ace and my search continues for a great sounding set of headphones with great active noise cancellation. To this day, none of them really wow me. Either I get really good sound quality but ANC that’s effectively non-existent, or really great ANC but sound quality of a $5 tin can.