Sonos Ace Ultra Review – Trusted Reviews

Introduction

By all accounts, Sonos’ first pair of headphones were a solid affair. For a company not synonymous with the headphones, it was a good first effort. But good is the enemy of great.

So here we are, a couple of years later with the Ace Ultra. The noise cancellation has been beefed up, sound quality improved, battery life extended and still the same lovely ergonomics that worked so well the first time around.

There was room for improvement, and with the Ace Ultra, Sonos has learnt a few lessons for – spoiler alert – a pretty terrific pair of wireless headphones.

Design

• Very comfortable
• Replaceable battery
• Physical buttons

If there’s a difference between the Ace and the Ace Ultra in terms of design, then I can’t see it. Unless something structurally inside has changed, these appear to be the same headphones with a slim profile that feel as if they’re vacuum-formed to my head.

Like the original, they fit like a pair of slippers, and while the sense of comfort is not as plush as others, they are very comfortable to wear, even for a glasses wearer like myself.

There’s plenty of space for my large lugholes to fit, and while the clamping force is on the tighter side, the pressure isn’t uncomfortable. The fit is secure, with a stepless slider to adjust things. I’ve worn these headphones for hours straight and the only problem I’ve had is a bit of pinching from not placing the headphones on properly.

They’re not collapsible, though, and left from right is easily figured out thanks to the contrasting colours inside the earcups. The earcups remain detachable, and you can replace the battery with Replacement Battery Kit for £25.

There’s no change in the way the Ace Ultra operate either, using physical controls over touch. The Content Key is where most of the action happens, covering playback, volume and calls. Just like before, hold it down and it initiates audio swap between the headphones and a Sonos soundbar, but Sonos has added another trick in the form of Headphone Linking. More on that later.

Other buttons include the Power/Bluetooth on the left earcup, while on the right it’s the ANC button for switching through the ambient sound modes. You can tweak the ANC button, but customisation is limited to which modes to cycle through.

I never really talked about the look of the original Ace but I did think they were a classy pair of headphones; the slim profile and minimal silhouette made for an elegant, sophisticated appearance that carries over to the Ace Ultra.

The black and white colourways made them less distinctive but this time around, Sonos has furnished the line-up with Agave and Sand finishes; the latter is the version you see. The glossy accents contribute to what feels like a premium pair of wireless headphones, not something you can say about the rest of the competition.

There’s a carry case for travel, and in a change from before, all the cases are black but the Sonos branding is etched in the colour of the headphones; and inside is the same colour too. The case can get marked and scruffy looking if you travel with it a lot, and the zip is still annoying to deal with as it doesn’t always easily unzip.

Sonos retains the smaller internal case where the cables reside, that detaches and attaches to the main case via a magnet. Cables include a USB-C to 3.5mm and USB-C cable for charging/audio (there’s no 3.5mm input on the Ace Ultra).

Features

• Dolby Head-Tracking
• Snapdragon Sound support
• Works with refreshed Sonos app

Bluetooth-wise, not much has changed. Wireless support has been pushed to Bluetooth 6 but you won’t gain much from that unless you have a compatible source.

Codecs include SBC, AAC and aptX Adaptive (Snapdragon Sound), and the connection has barely faltered while walking through London or airports and train stations. For Snapdragon Sound, you’ll also need a compatible source to benefit from the higher level of performance that codec brings.

There’s Bluetooth multipoint to connect to two devices simultaneously, though this isn’t enabled by default in the app.

Speaking of the app, Sonos has overhauled it after the massive criticism it received around the time of the original Ace. I won’t write too much about the app itself here, but it does feel more responsive with many features that went missing restored.

To adjust the settings of the Ace Ultra, the app needs access to Wi-Fi, which feels like an odd restriction but the app is meant to run off a Wi-Fi signal and not your mobile data. If you’re out and about and want to adjust something, you’ll find there’s no access to the app. If you’re connected to a different Wi-Fi network, you can still adjust the headphones settings, though you won’t have access to your full Sonos set-up.

In the Headphones section of the app you can customise the headphones’ name, monitor battery life, adjust Noise Control (ANC), toggle on Adaptive ANC, Sidetone or Voice Boost with the Aware Mode.

The Ace Ultra also features more in-depth EQ settings. Before you could alter bass and treble, left/right balance and Loudness. Now you can customise the mids, give bass and treble a boost at lower volumes, and with the Adaptive EQ, the headphones can adapt based on how the headphones fit your head.

That’s further aided by the Advanced 8-band EQ that also allows you to play with the Gain setting of the headphones for the more advanced users out there.

TV Audio Swap is back, and if you have a Sonos soundbar, the Ace Ultra can connect directly over Wi-Fi to play audio through the headphones. The Ace proved it worked and nothing’s changed with the Ace Ultra. Press and hold the Content Key when you’re near the soundbar and it’ll zap audio to the headphones.

TrueCinema can adapt the tuning of the sound to your room, and there’s also spatialised audio and head-tracking so what you’re hearing stays in place while you move your head.

Of more interest is a feature I thought the Ace would bring but makes its debut with the Ace Ultra in Headphone Linking, which is currently in Early Access. It’s only been made possible thanks to improvements in the Sonos app platform (thanks to the Sonos27 AI upgrade), and the hardware in the Ace Ultra, but you can now extract audio from a nearby Sonos speaker and fling it back to and from the headphones.

Like with TV Audio Swap, you have to press and hold the Content Key to initiate the switch and it works, though I will caveat by mentioning that the first few times you try it, it does take slightly longer than you might expect for the exchange to work.

It’s meant to work by line of sight, figuring out which is the nearest speaker, but if you have multiple speakers near each other, the Ace Ultra may extract or pick up sound from a speaker you didn’t want to. In my living room, with a Beam Ultra and Era 300, the headphones picked up the audio of Project Hail Mary from the Beam and when I tried to send it back, it went to the Era 300 instead. It helps to be close to whichever speaker to avoid any issues.

But once it’s up and running, the Headphone Linking gets quicker. It gets used to where speakers are in your set-up, the linking gets the quicker the more you use it. It becomes a magic sleight of hand after a while, and speaks to what I wrote pre-release with this feature really tapping into what Sonos can offer with its ecosystem.

Battery Life

• 35 hours with ANC
• Rapid Charging
• Power Saving Mode

Battery life with the previous Ace was around 30 hours with ANC on, and that proved to be true via testing. Sonos claims the Ace Ultra pushes that to 35 hours with ANC or Aware mode on, and guess what, Sonos is on the money.

A three-hour battery drain at 50% volume saw the headphones fall by 8%. Do the maths and that’s around 38 hours of battery life, so arguably you can get a bit more life from the headphones over daily and weekly use.

Fast, or Rapid Charging, as Sonos calls it, provides three more hours from a three-minute charge. It’s enabled by default, but If you don’t want it, you can disable. If you have depleted the battery, a full recharge takes about three hours to do.

In the app there’s a Power Saving Mode, though enabling this does limit features such as volume, Noise Control and head tracking.

Noise Cancellation

• Strong performance
• Natural Ambient Sound mode
• Average call quality

Here’s the thing about the Ace Ultra’s noise cancelling performance. It is better than the original Ace, but I can’t quite tell you how it’s better. Bear with me.

The levels of suppression seem fairly similar but it’s the tone, if that makes sense, that seems to cut through and thin out noise better than the previous model. In real-world use, the Ace Ultra is very good – it subdues most sounds walking through London and busy hubs such as Farringdon, Soho and Canary Wharf. Wearing these headphones feels like you’re in your own space, and it tackles people’s voices well, with traffic and footfall in places like Oxford Street not an issue.

On transport, it’s very effective too. Wearing them on a plane, the journey was quiet. On public transport and there were times where I forgot I was wearing the headphones – it’s a constant bubble of mostly silence.

The Aware Mode picks up from before in sounding so natural and clear that there’s no difference I can pick up on wearing the headphones or taking them off. This has always been a strength of the Ace headphones and you can pick up on announcements easily without straining to hear what’s said.

I did critique the older model as it wasn’t the best for having conversations with the headphones on. There’s now a Voice Boost mode that picks up on voices when the headphones are in Aware Mode, but I struggle to listen to music and hear someone speak at the same time, so I pause music and I’ve easily been able to have conversations with others while still wearing them.

Compared to the cream of the crop in the headphones market, I’d say the Ace Ultra are competitive but not at the top of the table. Both the Sony WH-1000XM6 and Bose QuietComfort Ultra Headphones Gen 2 squash sound slightly better, but the differences are minimal. I’d say the Sonos Ace Ultra is on the same level as the Sennheiser Momentum 5 Wireless, and that’s an excellent noise canceller.

There are a couple of other things to note though. There was some crackling as a plane shook during take-off but I’ve not had this issue anywhere else. On a more positive note it does handle wind noise very well, blustery conditions slide past the headphones’ microphones.

Call quality, however, is not the best. Like the Sennheiser, it focuses on your voice but also lets background sounds in, so your voice is still having to compete against what’s around you. The person on the other end did mention there was a slightly mumbly pick up to voice quality. Sony is better in this instance.

Sound Quality

• More detail and insight than original
• Weighty bass
• USB-C audio

On the sound front it’s still a 40mm custom dynamic drivers, though Sonos says these are “all-new”. With the older model I mentioned that I could listen to them for hours, and the same is true with the Ace Ultra. They have a sound that’s very ‘comfortable’ and that’s assisted by increased levels of detail and clarity over the original.

An issue I found over time with the original was the tone of the headphones. As comfortable as they sounded, they weren’t the most defined or expressive compared to their rivals. The Ace Ultra sound more expressive, bring a few degrees more dynamism to tracks, and revealing more detail – these new headphones are more insightful and a better performer.

Bass has a nice weight and tone to it in a track like Faye Webster’s Better Distractions, the midrange comes through with good sense of clarity and detail, along with a soundstage that’s wide and spacious if a little flat in terms of depth compared to the competition.

The Sony WH-1000XM6 brings more presence to vocals in tracks, as well as more nuance emotion to voices too. But towards the edges of the soundstage, the Sony can sound a little squashed compared to the Sonos; but I’d still prefer the Sony as it sounds more expressive. Treble in Isfar Sarabaski’s Swan Lake also sound a little blunted, not as bright or as detailed as the Sony can manage.

And the Ace Ultra are still a pair of headphones that need a nudge on the volume level as they can sound flat in the energy and excitement stakes. The neutral, flat approach to the frequency range is what the headphones are going for, but I do find the likes of the Sony and Sennheiser to more expressive, fluid and musical.

I’d say Sony and Sennheiser sound more natural and defter with music than the Ace Ultra – the tone of instruments and voices that both those headphones hit with Phoebe Bridgers’ Haunted presents the track with more insight than the Ace Ultra. It’s not a massive difference, but tonally and in terms of detail and insight, I still find Sonos lacking a little. But this is just Sonos’ second headphone, Sony and Sennheiser have a leg up in terms of experience.

The Ace Ultra supports lossless audio via wired input, though Sonos says this is limited to 16-bit/48kHz – the Bose QC Ultra Headphones Gen 2 offer 24-bit/192kHz as a point of comparison.

The tone is the same but the sense of spaciousness goes up a level, as do detail, clarity and levels of insight. I’d still say that highs aren’t the brightest but the extra resolution does help the Ace Ultra sound better in all aspects compared to Bluetooth.

If you want the best sound from the Ace Ultra, hook them up via USB-C and give them a high quality source and they’ll shine.

Should you buy it?