Sonos has launched the Ace Ultra headphones, with Wi-Fi speaker linking, 35-hour ANC battery life, and four colourways.
Sonos has unveiled the Ace Ultra, a follow-up to its 2024 debut headphones. The launch, which lands alongside the new Beam Ultra soundbar, builds on the success of the original Sonos Ace, which was a strong-sounding pair of cans hobbled by one glaring omission: no Wi-Fi. It streamed over Bluetooth like everything else on the market at the time, which left Sonos’s actual selling point — a connected multi-room system — mostly out of reach.
The Ace Ultra fixes that. It adds Wi-Fi streaming and a new “Headphone Linking” feature that hands audio between your speakers and your headphones without touching a phone, meaning the music keeps playing as you walk from the living room to the kitchen with nothing but the headphones themselves doing the work.
That’s the detail worth paying attention to. Every noise-cancelling flagship promises better drivers and longer battery life — the Ace Ultra does too, with a custom 40mm driver per ear cup, adaptive ANC pulling from ten microphones (up from eight), and 35 hours of listening with ANC or Aware mode engaged, up three hours from the original. In addition, a three-minute rapid charge buys three hours of playback. But the Wi-Fi tie-in is the feature a Bose or Apple pair simply can’t replicate.
For the modern audiophile already living inside a Sonos ecosystem — Arc Ultra soundbar in the living room, Era speakers scattered through the flat — this is the piece that makes the whole system finally talk to your ears properly.
The Ace Ultra ships in four colourways — Black, Soft White, Agave and Sand — and features USB-C charging, 3.5mm, Bluetooth 6.0 and Wi-Fi connectivity, and a snazzy travel case. Whether it converts diehard AirPods Max or Bose QuietComfort Ultra users remains to be seen; what’s certain is that Sonos just gave its own ecosystem the first real reason to switch.
