Comfortable to wear and good battery life, but ANC could be improved – The Week

When it comes to high-end headphones in the Indian market, we often think of Sony, Sennheiser, Apple and Bose in the context of consumer offerings. There aren’t many brands with premium offerings that regularly come out with high-end consumer offerings. Sonos has launched its first on-ear headphones in India. Priced at Rs 39,999, the Sonos Ace is just above the latest ANC headphones from Sony and Bose, but is it priced enough to justify buying it? Let’s find out.

One of the first things you might notice about this pair of headphones is that the steel shaft has only a small visible part, since the bending mechanism is inside. Available in white and black, I much prefer the matte white for its subtle design, and they don’t get streaks easily.

The outer half of the ear cups are magnetically attached and are removable. The inside of the ear cups are white and green with left and right side markings. The right ear cup has the Sonos logo on the outside, and there’s a Content button (again made of stainless steel), an ANC button, and a microphone grille on the side. The left side of the ear cup houses another set of microphone grilles (for a total of 8 microphones), a circular power/pairing button, as well as a USB Type-C port and a small status light. The center band also has faux leather and memory foam around it for comfort. Both ear cups are slightly tilted according to the corresponding side to better fit your ear. I found them comfortable to wear for over two hours at a time, sometimes without feeling tired or any discomfort to the ears. The adjustable size mechanism also helps when wearing them on your head and its shape. Oh, and in the box, along with a nice compact case and a USB Type-C charging cable, you get a rear USB Type-C to 3.5mm audio cable.

The Sonos Ace supports Bluetooth 5.4 along with SBC, AAC, and aptX audio codecs and is powered by 40mm drivers. The Content button is a multi-function button—slide it up to increase volume, slide it down to decrease volume, and press it once to pause or resume playback. Pressing the ANC button lets you toggle between noise cancellation, Awareness Mode (transparency), or turn them off. A long press on the power/pairing button pairs the headphones with a new device, putting them into pairing mode. You can use the Sonos app on your paired phone to change settings, choose EQ, connect to multiple devices, update firmware, or add more Sonos products to work with older ones. The Ace paired with Android and iOS devices without any glitches, and adding and pairing was also convenient the first time.

When it comes to sound quality, the Sonos Ace did not disappoint and delivered a sound that could be described as balanced and richly detailed overall. The headphones lack bass and offer clean and sufficient bass, but I wouldn’t say they are aimed primarily at bass lovers. You do get clean guitar strings and low mids. It’s worth playing around with the equalizer in the Sonos app a bit to adjust it to your preferences, as the headphones can sound quite different depending on the genre of music when a different set of settings are applied. The head tracking feature, when enabled from the app, works quite well and does not cause any distortion or jagged effects that sometimes occur with this feature in other headphones. I didn’t notice any major latency issues when using the Ace to watch TV shows, movies or YouTube videos. As for active noise cancellation, the headphones do a pretty good job of blocking out ambient noise, which is important to ensure they fit snugly against your body for the effect to be noticeable. In my opinion, however, the Sony WH-1000XM5 and Apple AirPods Max (although significantly more expensive) do a slightly better job of isolating noise while not negatively impacting the overall sound quality when ANC is turned on.

The Sonos Ace also has something called audio swap, where you can swap your Sonos Arc soundbar connected to your TV and quickly to the Ace with a single tap of a button (via WiFi). I tried this briefly with a controlled setup and it worked smoothly, with full head tracking and Dolby Atmos. For now, you can only do this with one pair of Ace.

When it comes to battery life, the Sonos Ace doesn’t disappoint – with ANC off, it delivered around 40 hours of total playback, and around 30 hours with ANC on. Of course, you can also use it wired – via the 3.5mm audio jack or USB Type-C, which I tried for improved lossless playback.

All things considered, the Sonos Ace seems to be a good start for the company when it comes to personal audio. The Sonos Ace is really comfortable to wear, looks nice, and has good battery life too. While the sound quality is generally good in most cases, the ANC has some room for improvement. All things considered, it seems to pack enough punch to compete with the likes of Sony, Bose, and Sennheiser in the long run.