🎧 Sonos Ace Ultra ($449) pulls what’s playing on your Sonos speakers into your headphones with one button, then pushes it back out, all over WiFi, not Bluetooth
🔊 Beam Ultra ($699) is the first Beam soundbar with dedicated up-firing drivers, true 7.1.2 Dolby Atmos, just 2.56 inches tall
🆕 Sonos 27 (free), the new name for the software running every Sonos S2 speaker
🤖 AI arrives via Sonos 27voice, Sonos 27mcp (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini) and Custom Agents. It’s here to control your system, not generate tacky AI music, thankfully
📆 Pre-orders are open now, shipping September 29
I’ll admit the timing on this one stung. Sonos held its biggest launch event in years in New York on the same day I flew to IFA Berlin without my ANC headphones. The irony! Yes, folks, I was caught wearing the free crummy earbuds that Delta hands out, attempting to drown out my nearby chatty seatmates. It. Didn’t. Work.
My consolation prize before I took off for Germany was an insightful briefing with Brandon Holley, Sonos’s interim hardware lead, and Andrew Sutherland, senior director of product management, to preview the ultimate in-flight fix: the Sonos Ace Ultra.
I wanted these headphones last week when I first learned all about them. I really wanted them this week during my eight-hour jaunt to Berlin.
The Sonos Ace Ultra headphones aren’t launching alone. I also got to ask questions about the new Beam Ultra soundbar, the Sonos 27 operating system update, and the company’s strategic use of AI. Here’s what I learned.
Sonos Ace Ultra: headphones that act like a Sonos speaker
🎧🔗 Headline feature: Headphone linking. Sonos built the Ace Ultra headphones from the ground up based on your feedback and our review – it wasn’t in one earcup and out the other 😏. The star of the show is Headphone Engine 2, with Holley noting that “Headphone linking was the most requested feature we had from our [original] Sonos Ace.”
🛜 How it works. The Content Key, located on the right cup, can now dictate audio possession. Hold it down and whatever music or podcast is playing on a nearby Sonos speaker jumps into your headphones. Walk into another room, press this button again, and the sound jumps back to the nearby speaker. This happens over reliable WiFi, not Bluetooth, so your phone can stay in your pocket.
📆 When and what to expect. Headphone Linking launches alongside the headphones in Early Access on September 29. The 2024 Ace keeps its TV Audio Swap trick with soundbars, but it lacks the Headphone Engine 2 hardware (i.e., redesigned WiFi and secure credential storage), so it will never get the full node-in-the-system linking. If there’s one reason to upgrade, this is it.
🤓 For my glasses wearers. Holley called Sonos’s latest tweak to how ANC works his favorite feature, and anyone who wears glasses and headphones at the same time will agree. As much as I love my Meta Ray-Bans, their thick frames always break the seal between the ear cushions and my head. The Ace Ultra fixes this by measuring the seal on each ear cup and adjusting both ANC and EQ in real time to compensate. This fix also applies to people with thick hair, earrings, or anything that leaks sound.
💵 Still $449 MSRP. Here’s a bright spot among inflation-dominated tech headlines: Sonos Ace Ultra is launching at $449 on September 29, the same price as the original Ace headphones in 2024.
🎨 New colors. Sonos Ace Ultra comes in four colors: the traditional Black and Soft White, and two new Ace Ultra colors, Agave and Sand. There’s also a Sand-colored Sonos Play (the portable+home speaker I really liked and still use) arriving on September 29 to match.
Everything else that’s new
2x the ANC of the original Ace at low frequencies (2.2x at 65Hz, the HVAC hum), from a 10-mic array, up from 8
35 hours with ANC on, up from 30; a 3-minute charge gets you 3 hours of playback
Sonos-designed 40mm driver, tuned with its Soundboard of Grammy- and Oscar-winning engineers
Lossless over Bluetooth 6.0 (aptX Adaptive Lossless on Snapdragon Sound Android phones), plus USB-C and 3.5mm wired listening
3-band and 8-band EQ, Dolby head tracking, and TrueCinema, which models your room so soundbar audio in your headphones sounds like it’s still in the room
Replaceable battery and magnetic ear cushions. Built to be repaired, not replaced
Sonos 27: the software finally gets a name
For 20 years, Sonos’s speakers have been talking to each other without a proper name for the software. That’s about to change with the introduction of Sonos 27 for every S2 product available – and the yearly cadence means more predictable updates. It’s a lot like we see today with Apple’s iOS 27 naming convention, so stay tuned for Sonos 28 rumors.
Before we get 12 months ahead of ourselves, let’s talk about this fall’s free update. The big highlight is Sonos 27voice, an LLM-based assistant, fine-tuned in-house by the Sonos teams, for controlling your speakers and discovering the right music.
Since half of The Shortcut audience thinks AI is the devil, and half want my advice on the best AI prompts, I asked Sutherland and Holley point-blank about how an artist-first tech brand like Sonos implements AI without stepping on toes.
“When we talk about what we’re trying to do, we’re really talking about control,” Sutherland told The Shortcut. “We’re talking about volume and grouping, and how actually you experience these things in your home.”
He added the most important point creators want to hear: “We’re not creating content. We’re not generating anything.”
Sonos won’t force you to use its assistant, either. Sonos 27mcp is built on the open MCP standard, so ChatGPT and any other MCP-capable AI, including Claude and Gemini, can plug in. Early Access starts September 8, and further down the line, Sonos will support custom agents, up to 10 on one speaker, each with its own model, voice, and persona.
Sonos Beam Ultra: a new soundbar tier
The new Ace Ultra headphones are just part one of Sonos’s Ultra story for new hardware in the latter half of 2026. The Beam Ultra is also launching for $699 on September 29, offering nine drivers, five tweeters, and four woofers (four more than Beam), including two up-firing drivers for true 7.1.2 Dolby Atmos and a rebuilt center channel.
My favorite part is that it’s smaller than my current Samsung soundbar at home at just 2.56 inches tall and 29.5 inches wide. At those dimensions, it’s not going to block anyone’s TV. It’s $200 more than the standard $499 Sonos Beam Gen 2, so think of the Beam Ultra as a new tier rather than a direct replacement.