Transcript
0:00 So about 2 years ago, Sonos finally got into the overear headphone game with their Sonos Ace. They brought everything we loved about the Sonos ecosystem, their sound quality, their attention to detail, and put it into the overear form factor. And even though it was a great first attempt, there were still a couple things that were left to be desired, especially at the $450 price point. But now, their new Sonos Ace Ultra, they sound better. They have much better active noise cancellation. their bass and their low-end has gotten drastically better and even the app experience is much much better than it was before. So, in this video, let's break down exactly what's new with the Sonos Ace Ultra. Should you upgrade if you have a current Sonos Ace and if you're in the Apple ecosystem, are the Sonos Ace worth it over something like an AirPods Max 2? Let's break it down. So, you might have seen my initial impressions video about 3 weeks ago. I was lucky enough to get about an hour with them when I was in Epha at Berlin. And even though I did get a good experience with them, it was a very controlled environment. It was exactly what they wanted it to be. Even though I was able to play my own music, it was only an hour with those headphones. And the first impressions were good, but I wanted to get my hands on it and see exactly what it was like dayto-day. So, I've been using the Sonos Ace Ultra in this agave color, which is one of the new four colors that they come in for the last two weeks. And I've been absolutely loving it, especially all the improvements that they've made because like I said, the first Sonos Ace were a great first foray into the space for them, but they improved every single thing that needed to be improved for the Sonos Ace Ultra. And they did all this without actually increasing the price, remaining at $450. And I've used them in a ton of different scenarios from outdoors, indoors, running, working out, video editing, regular working, in loud environments, in quiet environments. So, I feel like I've given it its good paces and I have a good understanding of exactly what these headphones were like.
1:46 So, the overall design is going to remain relatively unchanged compared to the original Sonos Ace. They do come in two more additional colors, which I'll touch on in a second, but they're going to be very clean and understated headphones. The new matte finish to them is absolutely fantastic and has some chrome accents, especially around the actual buttons themselves, but you can see that they are very understated and they're very minimal. You do have the logo on one of the ear cups as well. But what I like about this is that they give you a good blend of different plastics, but also metals and very soft and cushiony materials. The headphone cups themselves are so so comfortable to wear even for long 6 8 10 hour plane rides, which I have taken them on already. And also the headband on top, they aren't nearly as heavy as something like an AirPods Max 2. So you don't get that kind of aching feeling that you would get with AirPods Max's after a while in the middle of your head. So, they've really emphasized things on comfort, portability, and also just overall usability because those ear cups are removable. They're replaceable. The battery itself is user replaceable as well. So, they want you to have longevity with these. Like, this is a purchase that you make once, it'll last you 5 to 10 years easily. Okay, so of course, we're going to talk about what's actually new, especially compared to the previous model. And the first thing you're going to notice, at least visually, is that there are a few new colors. So, they still have their black and their kind of stone or white color way, which they've had with the previous one, but I've been rocking the new agave color, which is kind of like this deep green or seafoam green combined with also navy and dark blue. Very, very nice. This is actually my favorite one out of the bunch. And they also have this kind of gold huish one, which is like beige in some lighting, but also rose gold in other lighting. So, again, some great colors to choose from, and that's how you will know if you have the Ultra or just the regular Ace headphones. But outside of the actual color themselves, they've actually improved everything internally to make everything just that much better. The first biggest change is that even though the first gen did have 40mm drivers, this new gen also does have the same 40mm driver, but they've completely reconstructed how they've actually come to those 40 mm. And the acoustics in here are completely different to how they were in the previous generation, which they do claim to have a much lower low end, which is something that for me was missing from the Sonos Ace headphones, the original ones. I'm somebody who likes to listen to a lot of low-end music. I like the the reverberations. I like the bass. I like to feel it. So, that missing in the first one, I mean, it wasn't missing completely. It was kind of there. But these really take it to the next level, which has been amazing to use in the day-to-day. And there's kind of this tricky middle ground where if you do kind of increase the bass, you can kind of increase the bass of any headphone no matter the price point. But the thing that really separates a Sonos Ace or a pair of high-end headphones is a separation between volume, loudness, bass, but then also the high-end and the vocals and still being able to understand and listen to everything in there without it getting too muddy. And the Sonos Ace Ultra have done that masterfully in the ways that I've been listening to them. They've also increased the number of microphones. So, the last gen had eight microphones. This one has a 10 mic array, which does help improve the overall active noise cancellation. And Sonos does claim that it's up to two times better than the previous generation. I can't really measure that 100% in terms of how good the noise cancellation is. But yes, it has gotten better. It deals with consistent noise much better. But more importantly, those kind of random popping noises of maybe an ambulance flying by or somebody drilling in the middle of the New York City streets or maybe something loud popping like a firework and things like that. It handles those noises much better compared to the first gen Sonos Ace. And they've added a nextgen adaptive ANC which is very helpful for people like myself that wear glasses a lot of the time or they have earrings on or long hair because again if you don't have a perfect seal then you need something like an adaptive ANC to adapt to all the different noises are bleeding in through the actual cups themselves. So again if you have glasses you can't fully seal that. So you get a little bit of bleed in here but again the adaptive active noise cancellation has helped remedy that. And then also the inapp experience has gotten better. The application itself has gotten drastically better as well compared to the whole mishap that they had around 2 years ago where they completely rebranded the Sonos application. But now all those kind of old features that people loved are now slowly coming back. Connecting to these headphones is super easy. You can either connect them in the traditional way without the app whatsoever via the Bluetooth settings or you can use the actual application to give you more of an AirPods like kind of pairing experience where it just recognizes it immediately after opening out of the box. And once it's set up, for the most part, I kind of just mess with the new EQs. You have two new ways to customize the EQs with a new threeB and a new eight band EQ option inside the Sonos application. So, and that is going to be the only way to mess with the EQ and kind of get you a custom one with the Sonos Ace. And then outside of that, you don't really need to use the app. You can control everything from the buttons themselves. You can customize what the buttons do with active noise cancellation, transparency mode, or a wear mode. You have it completely turned off. And then you also have all your different call features and your play, pause, forward media controls as well.
6:25 So, you can customize those a little bit if you want to inside the application. And they've also upgraded a lot of the internals to really 2020 this. So from a battery standpoint, we are going from 30 hours with&c to now 35 hours with&c turned on, which is a nice little upgrade from a battery life perspective. We're getting Bluetooth 6.0 and we're getting fast charging of just 3 minutes of charging gives you 3 hours of listening time. The Ultra also supports spatial audio and Dolby Atmos. The dynamic head tracking which you control inside the application. Lossless audio through supported apt X devices or USBC.
6:53 It brings a USBC and a 3.5 millmter headphone jack in the packaging itself. And you also get Bluetooth multipoint, which is something that I use literally every single day cuz I swap between my iPhone and my Mac constantly to edit videos on this thing, but then also take it on my phone to be able to walk my dog and listen to music or work out with the music that I listen to. So multipoint has been great. And you also have wear protection, meaning if you take it off, it'll stop the music or whatever media you're playing. And you have a wear mode with a voice boost option as well. So, if you need to increase the volume of somebody that you're speaking to, you can do that directly through the headphones themselves. And then, like I said, from my experience, these have been fantastic. I mean, they're easy to use. They're very comfortable. They feel and look extremely premium. I like how they have this kind of like shiny metal where you can kind of resize it very similar to AirPods Max, but then also bringing in their own design language with the nice matte finish, the cushiony cushions of the actual ear cups, the softness of the actual band over your head has been fantastic as well. and just listening. I mean, all the different media that I listen to from again the music with the type of music that I listen to. I'm a very R&B, hip-hop, then also pop heavy type of music, but then also I listen to a lot of podcasts. So, vocals and dialogue are a big deal. I listen to movies or watch movies all the time on my iPad or again on my iPhone, hopefully on the iPhone Duo here soon. So, there's a lot of different media situations, but more importantly, the scenarios that I'm in.
8:07 When it comes to editing video, again, these aren't reference monitor headphones, but they're still good enough and the latency is almost non-existent where it doesn't matter when you are editing with these Bluetooth headphones. When I am using something like Final Cut Pro on my Mac, but then also when I am walking the New York City streets or just walking my dog and cars swoosh by and I'm able to cancel pretty much everything from a noise perspective. And like I said, I recently took about an 8h hour flight and I didn't hear anything and the battery life barely took a hit. I still had 75% of my battery life after that 8 hour flight. So again, battery and overall experience and just usability and ready to use are fantastic on the Sonos Ace Ultra. And then they did do a little bit of rebranding on the Sonos app. Like I mentioned, they now have Sonos 27 and they brought a lot of AI and machine learning features. I'm not going to go too in depth into these, but because this is part of the Sonos ecosystem, it pairs fantastically if you are somebody that has a bunch of different Sonos products. So I have a Sonos Arc Ultra that I use my TV. I have a Sonos Move 2. I have a couple other Sonos products laying around the house.
9:02 And there's a couple of cool new features because again with the Sonos Ace, the original ones, one of their big headlining features is being able to move the audio from your Arc Ultra of whatever you're watching on your TV over your headphones if you need a quiet environment but still want to watch whatever media you're watching. But now they've actually taken that to the next level with their new headphone engine 2, which is what they're calling it. And basically, if you're in your Sonos system and you're all on the same Wi-Fi and you're using the Sonos application, you can actually bounce whatever music from whatever speaker or headphones are coming from and put them wherever you are. So if you are maybe listening to something on your Arc Ultra or on your Beam or maybe on your Sonos Move 2 or your Play Twos, then you can easily just press a button, hold it down within 3 seconds, move that into your headphones if you are leaving the area, leaving the home or leaving to a different room and you'll be good to go. So, it's able to recognize where you are, what you're listening to, what the closest speaker is to your headphones and automatically move that media to the headphones and turn it off of the actual speaker that it's playing on, and then leave that speaker available to whoever else wants to use that speaker in the home. So, for me, these have been a great improvement in terms of how I listen to music, how I listen to media, and it's been awesome as somebody who's a big Sonos user to begin with. So, for me, yes, it is worth it to upgrade from the Ace over to the Ace Ultra because of the improvements that they made in sound quality, active noise cancellation, the new colors, and then of course, all the new features that are coming with the Sonos Ace or the Sonos 27 application. But even if you aren't somebody who's in the Sonos fear and you're not in the Sonos ecosystem and you're looking for a high quality pair of headphones, I'm talking in the premium lineup because again, these are $450. I mean, they're not quite AirPods Max's, but they're still in the Sony WXM, whatever those are called. They're also on the other side with the Bose headphones. Those are going to be in the same kind of category of premium line active noise cancellation headphones. These are definitely worth considering. They're high quality. They're built well. They look fantastic. They're very, very comfortable. Even with long listening sessions, and they still have the superpower of being in the Sonos ecosystem. So, so if you do end up dabbling in there, you'll be ready to go and be able to play nice with everything else you get. But that'll really do it everybody. My only piece of advice for Sonos is to please have a better zipper system for the case itself. The first generation case, the zipper always got stuck. the second generation case, they did not fix that zipper, which is very annoying. But outside of that, the headphones themselves are fantastic.
11:13 So, if you guys are in the market for a high quality premium pair of headphones, I'm going to link them down below. They are available to pre-order now, I believe, for >> >> $450 and they'll be available to receive on September 29th. So, let me know what you guys think with a comment down below. If you didn't make it to the end, leave a little dolphin. And like I said, if you want to watch more videos like this one or see my first impressions with them, check out one of these videos right here. Until next time, I'm Fernando.
11:36 Peace. Fall.