Transcript
0:00 Well, all right, everyone, to start off the IFA festivities, I wanted to make a first impressions review of the brand new Sonos Ace Ultra. I've been a Sonos fan for a very long time. I got the Sonos Ace headphones when they initially released the original ones, and to this day, they're still my go-to travel over-your-head phones because of the comfort, the active noise cancellation, and just how well it's always worked inside of the Apple ecosystem. And of course, I'm a big Sonos user to begin with. But, like I said, I got an exclusive first-hand look of the new Sonos Ace Ultra.
0:30 And they fixed pretty much all the issues that the Sonos Ace had and made and added a bunch of other stuff. So, let's break down everything new. So, now, what exactly is new about these new Sonos Ace Ultra? Cuz again, on the surface, they look relatively the same. If you don't have one of the new colors, which we'll touch on in a second, you might not know that somebody has the new Sonos Ace Ultra headphones or the Sonos Ace. But, the first thing they improved was the active noise cancellation. They moved to a 10-mic array to help with the new ANC to make sure that no noise bleeds in. And what's awesome about this is that even if you're somebody like this that wears glasses, or maybe you have earrings on, they're actually adjusting in real time for that because there's going to be a physical bleed into the headphone itself because of something like this. Or like I said, if you do have earrings or anything else around your ears. So, the 10-mic array allows you to still have that and still gives you pristine active noise cancellation. When I was demoing it live in the studio, it was actually very impressive how strong they canceled pretty much everything both on the low end and on the high end when it comes to whatever sound is trying to bleed inside of the headphones. But, then again, how do they sound? So, this is just my first impressions. I only get about 20 minutes of actual listening time on the headphones themselves. I do plan on getting an actual pair, and I'll have a full review on those, especially comparing them to the old ones, and obviously comparing them to the AirPods Max because as Apple users, that's going to be the default over-ear headphone option. But, the sound quality did get much better. They're still using the custom 40-mm drivers with support for spatial audio, Dolby Atmos, lossless playback on supported devices, or USB-C.
1:56 But, they also added in an adaptive EQ, which by default gives you a three-channel kind of customization with the EQ, but if you go into their advanced mode in the settings, you get up to an eight-channel change-up, which I'd love to see. And the one thing that I noticed, because we did get to use our own phone and our own music to kind of listen to music in real-time, the bass has increased big-time. That was one of the gripes that I had with the Sonos Ace, the original ones. They weren't as thumpy as I would want them to be. I know not everybody needs to have the craziest bass and the biggest thump, but for somebody like myself and the kind of music that I listen to, that is very important. And I'll give it a thumbs-up for my quick kind of first impressions on the bass of the Sonos Ace Ultra. And then what I liked about this first impression scenario is that yes, they had a curated list of music that you could try out on the Sonos Ace headphones, but they had a little section at the end where they gave us 10-15 minutes to say, "Hey, if you want to use your own phone, connect it via Bluetooth, listen to whatever music you like, because you know what music you listen to, and it might not be what we curate for everybody." And I thought that was very beneficial to kind of test out what a non-curated list would look like. Being able to distinguish different sounds in different areas with Dolby Atmos and spatial audio was actually really beneficial to see how Sonos has come in the headphone space, because again, the Sonos Ace headphones was the first kind of headphone product that they've ever released. So, it was a new category for them. Obviously, they've been known for pristine home sound and their soundbars and their bases and things like that, but they've really improved on now the Sonos Ace Ultra in terms of really distinguishing the different pieces of sound and the different instruments and the different vocals and the dialogue that's happening with the music and for just regular audio listening. So, overall, with my first impressions, I was listening to very bass-heavy music at first, then some kind of soft piano music as well.
3:30 If you guys do want to see some of the stuff that I listened to, like the Bossies of the world, obviously little Justin Bieber thrown in there. So, overall, I was very satisfied and happy, and I immediately could tell the difference that there was an improvement with the Sonos Ace Ultra versus the previous generation. But what Sonos is really focusing on here is going to be on the software and UI side, right? Because of course, we all saw the Sonos app revamp about 2 years ago, and I'll kind of just leave it there. Comment down below if you guys know what I'm talking about. But, they're rebranding their Sonos app to Sonos 27 to match up with iOS 27 in the Apple ecosystem. And what they're doing here is of course they're going to be using AI and machine learning to kind of help out with using your Sonos ecosystem and what they're calling a new fabric system, right? So, it's going to be basically if you are on your Wi-Fi and you are in your Sonos ecosystem using the Sonos app, all your Sonos pieces of hardware, including your headphones, are going to talk to each other and they're like aware of each other at all times, which I thought was really cool. But, the demo they used was going to be about their headphone engine 2. So, if you guys do remember, if you had a Sonos Ace pair, the old the previous version, and you had an Arc or an Arc Ultra, you were able to hand off whatever audio was coming out of your TV to those headphones. And that was pretty much it.
4:36 That was the extent of that feature. It was a nice feature to have, but now they've kind of expanded that into this fabric ecosystem, which allows you to, no matter what Sonos piece of hardware that you have around your house, you can easily switch between listening to something out loud or maybe a movie 2 or Sonos Play or maybe even your Era 300s and then press a button, you hold it down on your headphones, and it'll automatically switch into your headphones and stop playing on that Sonos machine, and then that Sonos is freed up to be listened to or used by anybody else in the home. So, that fabric system is basically when you press that button, what is happening is that it's pinging the actual Sonos ecosystem saying like, "Hey, let's see which one of these Sonos speakers is on, which one is closest to the person that's being used, which one's closest to the headphones?" And then we'll move whatever audio is on that system into the headphones themselves. And it happened within, I want to say, a 3-to-4 second span. There was like this pulsating thing that was happening, which was kind of futuristic, and then within three of those pulses, the music went from the Sonos Move over into my headphones, and it worked magically. I thought it was very cool. Now, the one thing you do need to know about this is that you do need to be playing the media through the Sonos app. So, if you're just using regular Bluetooth and you're using Apple Music or you're using Spotify through the Spotify app, then you can't do this kind of fabric ecosystem situation. It all has to be through the Sonos app, which I think is totally fine and fair. So, if you do live in that Sonos app, it's going to be very beneficial. If you are moving around the house and you may need to die down the music because people are sleeping or you want to move it from whatever speaker to your headphones and vice versa, I thought the feature was was awesome. And while I'm focusing mostly on the Sonos Ace Ultra, this feature actually expands to the entire Sonos ecosystem. So, so if you do have the new Sonos Beam Ultra, which is also releasing, you can bring a couple of Move 2s into the same room. They kind of recognize each other and then they automatically pair together to give you this awesome kind of surround sound, this three-channel surround sound. So, it's very cool how it's everything is just aware of each other, which I think is easier said than done. And then battery life got a decent improvement as well. We now get 35 hours with ANC or wear mode enabled. You can get a 3-hour playback time on just a 3-minute charge, which I thought it was very impressive.
6:35 And there's a new low-power mode in the Sonos app that can extend your battery life by up to another 30%. So, if battery life for you was an issue, it wasn't really for me with the original ones, but you now get more of that as well. And the comfort was fantastic. Obviously, the Sonos Ace headphones are amazing at comfort. That's why I usually gravitate to them. They're lightweight, they're cushy. You can remove the actual cushions of that earpiece as well to replace them. You have a user-replaceable battery as well. So, if you do have an issue with the battery or if the battery starts to die on you, you can replace it yourself, which I love to see. So, overall, the design, the comfort remains the same and it's still top in class. And then lastly, we got to talk about the new colors. So, last year we got the white one and the black one and this year we still have those two, but then we also have a stone color.
7:13 It's kind of like this nice tan beige very almost like rose goldy depending on how the light hits it, but then my favorite one is going to be the new agave color. It's kind of like this blue-green hue, still kind of dark and a deep color. They didn't go with navy, they went with this blue-green, which I love to see. So, the Sonos Ace Ultra, I think are going to be worth consideration. So, the Sonos Ace Ultra will be available starting September 29th. They're available on pre-order right now on Amazon, I believe on Sonos' website. So, I'll leave whatever links are necessary down below and they will be $449 starting price. So, they are cheaper than the AirPods Max 2 by about $100. So, it just depends on if you think the AirPods Max are worth the additional $100. But, like I said, we'll have a video comparing both of them side by side to see which one you should spend your hard-earned money on. But, that'll do it. Again, first impressions video. I do want to kind of put it through its paces. I want to take them on workouts. I want to do some long listening sessions with it. I want to see how it does over time.
8:02 >> >> So, stay tuned for a full review. And also, stay tuned for more Epos coverage. But, let's get out of here. If you guys made it to the end, leave a little dolphin. And if you guys want to watch more videos like this, check out one of these videos right here. Until next time, I'm Fernando. Peace.