Sonos will release a host of new updates for its Ace headphones, after they were caught up in the company’s disastrous app update.
The Ace headphones were first released almost exactly a year ago, after being announced in May 2024. They received positive reviews – but were immediately dragged into a major crisis for Sonos, which led to the company losing its chief executive among other changes.
The release of the Sonos Ace required an update to the app the company makes to control not only the headphones but all of its smart speakers. When that app update was released, it immediately broke many users’ setups.
In the year since, Sonos has been recovering from the problems. Its chief executive Patrick Spence has left the company, it has been forced to re-focus on fixing the app, and it has apologised to users a number of times.
Those problems meant that the headphones were somewhat overshadowed by the company’s other problems. But now it has released a host of new features aimed at putting the focus back on the Ace.
They include improved noise cancelling, a new feature that allows the headphones to model the room they are being used in to give the feeling that the sound is really being projected into it, and improved calling features. The headline feature of the Ace – which allows them to switch audio from a soundbar to the headphones, for a private experience while watching TV – can now also be used by two people at once, for when a couple might want to watch without disturbing their children, for instance.
Sonos said that the feature update was driven by a focus on ensuring that the headphones created “lasting value” and were a result of a “considered approach” that rejected “trend-driven obsolescence”, according to Jason White, Sonos’s head of software. “We built a platform that was powerful enough that we could deliver new features and functions through software with time,” he said.
“The company’s perspective is that we should narrow our focus and do those things as excellently as we can,” said Dana Krieger, vice president of design at Sonos. “We really want to make sure [releases] provide value when we do them, and not just put more churn and noise into the world.
But Mr White acknowledged that many users may be concerned about software updates given the company's recent track record.
The company has made “a number of changes throughout the way we do software” in response to the recent problems, Mr White said. That includes a “more diligent approach” to looking at data from users, as well as more specific testing in advance of the release.
Some of the new releases, such as the TrueCinema feature that models the room to match its sound within the headphones, had been promised at launch. Sonos said that it had received feedback from early users that suggested it wasn’t ready, and that it had been working to improve it since as a result.
But others – such as expanding the TV Audio Swap feature to two uses – had not been anticipated when the headphones were first released. When it built the product, Sonos ensured there was “space in the back end” of the product “so that we can actually be responsive to customer features”, Mr White said.
“We have our own forward-looking roadmap for software features for literally all of our products, but at the same time we don’t want to be so restrictive that we can’t respond to customer feedback,” he said. “I think that’s a lesson that was even more particularly highlighted in the last year.”
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