When Sonos released its Ace headphones earlier this year, the company promised it would soon bring extended compatibility for it. At launch, the headphones could only pair to the Sonos’ most expensive soundbar, the Arc, but now you can pair them with both generations of the Sonos Beam as well as the entry-level Sonos Ray. This means you don’t have to invest in the $900 Arc to take advantage of one of the main selling points of the Ace which is its TV Audio Swap feature.
Sonos seemed pretty confident about its new headset when it released them back in May, and ambitiously priced the Ace headphones at a whopping $450. While we praised the Ace for its eye-catching design and airy sound, we critiqued it for being an incomplete product. It featured a TV Audio Swap feature that only worked with one of the company’s soundbars, the Sonos Arc. With the feature, you could press and hold the Control Key to seamlessly swap audio between the Ace and the Arc.
We weren’t fans of the company limiting its vertical integration to a $900 soundbar. It’s one thing to make a walled garden around your services; Apple always does that with its products. But it’s crucial to be smart about it. The integration simply didn’t provide enough value to be the product, especially for that price. Though the company said it would extend support for other sound bars “soon,” that wasn’t a convincing enough reason for me to invest half a grand back then.
The extension of the compatibility to cheaper soundbars finally makes the $450 headphones a bit more usable, because it means I can enjoy the feature on the $270 Ray or the $500 Beam 2. Sonos is also working on its highly problematic app to make it more efficient and functional, and I’m looking forward to seeing how that plays out.