Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Did Sonos out-design the AirPods Max?”.
Hey hey it’s Chris Welsh with the Verge, and I just got back from seeing the new Sonos Ace. Headphones. They’Ve been rumored for years now and they’re coming out soon, Sonos is getting into the ring, with apple Bose, Sony and other headphone makers, with its first ever pair of noise cancelling wireless headphones when you’re outside the house, they’re just a nice pair of music headphones and When you’re home they’ve got some really neat home, theater features, so let’s get into all of it. Okay, right off the bat, it’s hard not to be impressed by this design, design the ace aces whatever you want to call them. They feel like headphones from a company.
That’S been doing this for a very long time in your hands and on your head. There’S nothing about them! That feels like a gen, Juan product they’re way lighter than the airpods max, but still give off a premium. Vibe thanks to Polished, metal, sliders, vegan, leather, padding and memory foam in the cushions and headband those ear pads are magnetic and easily removable. Where have I seen that before and the inside of each earpad is a different color, so you can tell which side is which and even if you’re not paying attention those magnets? Don’T let you mix them up. Even the fabric carrying case is pretty snazzy and it stays put using you guessed it magnets. All of these small touches go to show how much thought has gone into the Sonos Ace headphones.
Sonos has chosen to go with all physical controls, so there are no tap gestures or sliding motions to worry about. The stainless steel rocker is called the content key. You can move it up and down to ad just volume volume push in to player pause or hold it down to transfer TV audio from a Sono soundbar to the headphones for private. Listening with spacal audio surround sound, but first, let’s cover what these are like. As music headphones now, despite this being its first time out, Sonos claims to have achieved worldclass noise cancellation is that on par with Bose or Sony, if so, that’d be quite something.
These headphones also have a transparency mode that sounded nice and natural. During my brief demo session battery life is a decent 30 hours and for owners of newer Android phones. Sonos also supports Apex adaptive for higher quality, Bluetooth, audio iPhone owners get the usual AAC and SBC codec.
So there’s no lossless audio over Wi-Fi or anything, really unique about how Sonos handles music there, but that all changes the minute you use the Sonos Ace with any of the company’s Soundbars. This is where the headphones feel the most Sonos you hold down the content key for a second or two and Bam. The audio from your Soundbar instantly gets transferred over to the headphones. If you’re watching a Dolby, Atmos movie, you’ll get full spatial audio surround sound with head tracking Sonos, also upmix the stereo content, so that it works with spatial audio. But if you want just plain old, stereo sound, you can turn all those features off. There’S also something called true Cinema kind of like true play that analyzes the room and where you’re sitting it uses the Soundbar and mics inside the actual headphones to optimize spatial audio and make it feel like there’s really a surround sound system of speakers all around you.
The head tracking on Ace headphones is subtle and that’s by Design Sonos sound Guru. Giles Martin told me that if it was too gimmicky or obvious, people would just turn it off and then what’s the point of the feature in the first place, that home theater handoff to the headphones all happens over Wi-Fi instead of Bluetooth, which is interesting and Sono, Says any latency shouldn’t be perceptible to most people. Private listening from TV to headphones is nothing new. You can do it with airpods and an Apple TV.
Many Roku devices support it and any number of Google TVs. Let you pair up Bluetooth, headphones. You get the idea, but this is a convenience that people have grown to really love and Sono seems confident. That’S taking that to the next level and making the experience all the more immersive.
So that’s the Sonos Ace in a nutshell. The design is really something like. I said, but there’s so much more testing.
I have to do to see how well sons’s first ever headphones compared to some truly heavyweight competition with demand for its speakers and sound bar is slowing down lately. This is a huge new product for the company $ 450. Is a lot of money so stay tuned to The Verge for a full review coming closer to that June 5th release date, it feels like there have been rumors of son’s headphones for a long time and they’re. Finally, almost here, so I’m curious for your thoughts on the design, the features and that price drop, a comment below and thanks so much for watching. .