Sonos Ace

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Sonos CEO apologizes for botched app redesign, promises month-by-month updates

apologies, patrick spence, software updates, Sonos, Sonos Ace, Tech / /

More like a downdate, amirite? —

Restoring previously present features is Sonos’ No. 1 priority.

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Two people with extremely 70s vibes looking at Sonos' app, with shag carpeting, wood paneling, and houndstooth pants in the frame.

Enlarge / I don’t know how Sonos’ app might have developed during the groovy era their marketing images aim to summon, but it feels like it might not have wanted to rush head-long into disappointing users quite so quickly.

Sonos

Sonos issued a redesigned app in May, and what lots of customers noticed about it wasn’t the refreshed look, but the things from the previous design entirely missing. Not small things, but things that Sonos enthusiasts would really notice: sleep timers, local music library access and management, playlist and song queue editing, plus accessibility downgrades.

In May, a Sonos executive told The Verge that it “takes courage to rebuild a brand’s core product from the ground up, and to do so knowing it may require taking a few steps back to ultimately leap into the future.” You might ask if bravery could have been mustered to not release an app before it was feature-complete.

Now, nearly three months after shipping, Sonos leadership has pivoted from excitement about future innovations to humility, apology, and a detailed roadmap of fixes. CEO Patrick Spence starts his “Update on the Sonos app from Patrick” with a personal apology, a note that “there isn’t an employee at Sonos who isn’t pained by having let you down,” and a pledge that fixing the app is the No. 1 priority.

New updates have arrived every two weeks since the update, Spence writes, and there are more to come. A better device-adding experience and, finally, a local music library interface should arrive in July or August. August and/or September bring volume responsiveness, UI upgrades, and general stability, plus Alarm reliability. Editing your playlists and queue could arrive in September or October, according to Sonos’ post.

This is not the first time Sonos has acknowledged missteps in its aims to refresh its mobile apps, but it is the most public and contrite, and perhaps realistic in timing. In mid-May, Sonos emailed its software and API partners about “valuable feedback” on “the areas where we fell short,” according to an email obtained by Ars Technica. Back then, Sonos told partners it intended to have alarms, queue editing, sleep timers, local music libraries, and Wi-Fi update settings sorted by the end of June.

While different resources can be deployed on different projects, it didn’t help existing customers’ perceptions that, two weeks after shipping its rather incomplete mobile app updates, Sonos announced the Ace, new $450 headphones. As we wrote then, the update did make doing basic tasks like adjusting volumes faster, but its lack of existing features left Sonos “playing damage control with an angry subset of its normally loyal user base.” That user base, which has been asking the company what happened ever since early May, now has some sense that they’re not posting into the void.

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Pricey Sonos Ace headphones move the company beyond speakers for the first time

AirPods Max, bluetooth, headphones, Sonos, Sonos Ace, sonos arc, Tech, wi-fi / /

ANC —

Sonos jumps into the fray with Sony’s WH-1000XM5 and Apple’s AirPods Max.

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  • The new headphones look just like earlier leaks showed.

    Sonos

  • Here’s a marketing render of the headphones, showing the physical buttons.

    Sonos

  • And here’s the other side.

    Sonos

  • A view inside the cups.

    Sonos

  • A side view.

    Sonos

After months of rumors and leaks, audio brand Sonos has announced and revealed its first foray into personal audio with the Sonos Ace, pricey wireless over-ear headphones that compete with the likes of Apple’s AirPods Max and Sony’s popular WH-1000XM5.

The Bluetooth 5.4 headphones were shown to select press outlets in New York this week. It’s too early to judge their sound quality, but they’re priced at the high end, and Sonos has a good reputation on that front.

Each cup has a 40 mm driver, and there are a total of eight microphones for noise control. Notably, the headphones weigh less than Apple’s AirPods Max.

Like competing pairs, they have high-end features like effective active noise cancelling and aware modes, Dolby Atmos spatial audio, and head tracking. The killer feature is for users who are already using Sonos’ other products in their home theaters: you can quickly switch from playing audio on the Sonos Arc soundbar to the headphones and back. That works for any audio from your TV, including set-top boxes or game consoles.

It’s a bit like how Apple’s AirPods Max work with the Apple TV set-top-boxes. Support for other Sonos soundbars like the second-generation beam is coming later this year.

Additionally, the Ace will get a new feature called “TrueCinema” that leverages your Sonos speakers’ ability to create a 3D map of the room in order to simulate the acoustics of your own space when wearing the headphones and using spatial audio, in theory making it sound even more like you’re just listening on a normal in-room surround system. That feature is also coming later in the year, though.

Of course, the timing for this announcement couldn’t be worse for Sonos. The company is currently tangled up in a consumer backlash after it updated its mobile app but left out several features from the previous version, including accessibility options.

The app update was intended primarily to make it easier to get in and out of the app and to do basic tasks like adjust the volume without waiting on screens to load or taking too many steps—and it succeeds at that, which is long overdue. But it doesn’t have all the edge case features its predecessor does, and Sonos is playing damage control with an angry subset of its normally loyal userbase.

For the Ace, the app is needed to do things like adjust EQ and some other special features, but it’s not required for basic listening tasks like adjusting volume or noise cancellation settings. Thankfully, Sonos has opted for physical buttons for those things instead of either touch gestures or an app interface.

The Sonos Ace will release June 5, and it will cost $549.

Listing image by Sonos

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