Sonos is updating its Ace wireless headphones with a bunch of new features, including TrueCinema. It's about time – TrueCinema was supposed to arrive last year, so it's six months late.
TrueCinema analyses your room or viewing environment and adjusts the Ace's audio to suit it – a bit like Sonos' TruePlay soundbar tech but for headphones. The idea is to make it sound as if you're listening via a TV sound system rather than through headphones.
- Sonos TruePlay: what is it? How can you use it?
But that's not the only new feature coming the Ace's way. The firm has updated its TV Audio Swap feature so it now works with two pairs of Ace headphones at once. That means you can 'swap' the audio from your Sonos soundbar to two pairs of headphones, so you and a friend can watch together, in isolation.
Personally speaking we've never felt the urge to do that. But it could be useful if it's late and you don't want to wake the kids/annoy the neighbours.
We're also promised that the active noise cancellation (ANC) will adapt to how your headphones fit on your head. So it will adjust for any breaks in the acoustic seal caused by hair, glasses or hats in real-time to compensate for sound leakage.
Finally, we're also getting "high resolution" calls and a feature called SideTone, which lets you hear a little of your voice during calls when ANC is activated.
We had high hopes for the Ace, given the quality of Sonos' other products. But they only scored three stars. That was in part due to features missing at launch like TrueCinema, but also the iffy sound quality and buggy execution of the existing features – we found TV Audio Swap had delays to the handover and some distortion, for example.
Swap was also only available with the Arc soundbar and iOS devices initially, but has since come to the Beam Gen 2, Beam Gen 1 and Ray Sonos soundbars.
The Sonos Ace software update is rolling out from today. We'll be testing these new features soon and will add them to our Sonos Ace review.
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