A new soundbar and pair of headphones are upon us, and not just that, as Sonos kicks off IFA in much the way we could have expected: new gear and approached made to fix the calamity that occurred when the company launched its updated app and platform two years ago.
Has it really been that long? Sonos would probably want as many people to forget about that debacle, one that saw the app re-worked and yet went horribly wrong, removing features and making the system more buggy and frustrating for customers, all while setting up what the company said was a promising future. Sonos even said a public apology for what went wrong.
Two years on, things are better. The app is stable, features have returned, and that mention of promise has materialised into Sonos 27, the company’s latest audio-focused operating system, with two pieces of gear ready to show off what people can expect.
Sonos Beam Ultra
First up, there’s the gear, and that kicks off with a new soundbar: the Beam Ultra.
Essentially, this is Sonos taking its popular mid-range and more compact “Beam” soundbar, but giving it actual upward-firing speakers to add dimensionality.
Depending on how much your brain stores, you might wonder if the current Beam Gen 2 does exactly this, given it promises dimensional audio by way of Dolby Atmos.
The problem is it’s a bit of a trick. As we noted in our review of the Gen 2, the Beam uses an approach known as “psychoacoustic” audio to trick you, firing sound at different times to make the brain think its audio is dimensional.
In truth, the Beam Gen 2 wasn’t truly dimensional, but could sound like it did, and for the price it wasn’t a bad effort, either. It wasn’t the Arc and lacked upward-firing drivers, but it did the job well enough for a soundbar released in 2021.
That was five years ago. This year, the Beam Ultra fixes that.
A 7.1.2 speaker, it includes two speakers to fire up, a redesigned centre channel, and while Sonos hasn’t confirmed it, our guess is the point one (.1) is a similar bass chamber to what the Sonos Arc Ultra delivered.
The result will be a bigger sounding mid-range speaker, and one Australians will be able to get for $1099 when it launches later on.
Sonos Ace Ultra
A new soundbar is just one of the gadgets being announced, with Sonos also pushing forward with a new pair of headphones.
Released back in 2024, the Sonos Ace were definitely something, providing excellent audio in a comfortable design, entering a new more portable category for the speaker maker and pioneer of multi-room audio. It did take some time for the headphones to feel like Sonos was getting to where it was going, rolling out TV audio swap in the weeks and months after release, and then eventually a year later supporting two headphones on one soundbar if you didn’t want to wake the kids at night.
Two years later, Sonos is trying headphones again with the Ace Ultra, a new pair featuring a Sonos-designed 40mm driver on each side, an adaptive noise cancellation system powered by ten microphones (five per ear), and a piece of hardware Sonos calls “Headphone Engine 2” that lets you directly sync with whatever the Sonos system in your life is playing.
This was the goal of the original Ace: you could basically come home listening to your favourite tracks, and push it to the rest of the system. Or leave in the morning, and pull that music directly to your headphones. Your music never had to leave you.
But it just never cam to fruition, and just didn’t work that way.
In the Ace Ultra, that is what Sonos is attempting to make work again, with the headphones also supporting 35 hours of battery life, too.
Sonos 27
Fitting that together is actually a new operating system, something the company calls “Sonos 27” which is designed to make the whole system smarter using a combination of AI and something the company calls “Fabric”.
Essentially, the Sonos Fabric will allow Sonos speakers and headphones to “sense” each other and play nicely, using high frequency sounds to identify a location and change what they do, rather than having you force the outcome.
So if you wanted to use a portable Sonos Play as a rear speaker for a film played through a Sonos Beam, you’d simply pull it nearby, and the Fabric of Sonos 27 would work out it’s nearby and map it for you. No more messing about in the app.
That’s the idea, and if successful, it could make Sonos easier to use.
The company is also pushing ahead with improvements to the app, and given what happened last time, it might want to tread carefully.
However one thing you won’t be surprised to see Sonos getting is AI.
Sonos with AI
It is everywhere at the moment, and perhaps unsurprisingly, AI is also making its way to the Sonos ecosystem, as well. You probably expected that, and we did, too.
How AI will work inside Sonos is to use it in two ways. It’s not just the Giancarlo Esposito Gus Fring voice Sonos brought to the assistant a few years back, but a way to use some of that natural language you might already be using with the likes of Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini.
You’ll be able to ask it to play a certain song or album using Sonos 27voice, a system that will use the company’s own assistant, but if you want to let it connect to your own preferred AI chatbot, you can also switch to an agent using Sonos 27mcp.
Given the name “mcp”, the guess is that this will come with compatibility for the model context protocol known as “MCP”. If that’s the case, you should be able to link up Sonos 27 with an AI of your choosing, such as a locally run AI or even an agent you might be running your life with.
That said, Sonos hasn’t yet confirmed that, only noting services such as ChatGPT and Claude. But it would make a lot of sense, since MCP is an open-source standard.
“Twenty years ago, we made a bet that the rest of the industry is only now arriving at – a home deserves an audio operating system made just for it,” said Tom Conrad, CEO of Sonos.
“We built our system around a shared love of music and the belief that nothing sets the mood like great sound. Sonos 27 takes that further, bringing acoustic engineering, adaptable software, intelligence and design together in a way only Sonos can,” he said.
“This is just the start of what our audio operating system can do.”
Sonos Ultra availability
While the launch at IFA this week comes as no surprise (because mid-year tech slated for the end of the year almost always is launched around this time), the availability of these new gadgets is sooner than you might think.
Both the Beam Ultra and Ace Ultra are expected in Australia at the end of September, heading to stores on September 29, where Australians can expect to pay $1099 for the Beam Ultra and $699 for the Ace Ultra. Our friends in New Zealand (who might be reading this) can expect each for $1299 and $749 respectively.
And as for whether the standard Beam Gen 2 and standard Ace are sticking around, Sonos Australia hasn’t quite answered that yet. Our guess is the Beam Gen 2 will, especially given the rough thousand dollar price of the Ultra model versus the $799 the Beam Gen 2 normally runs for, while the Ace Ultra’s $699 price matches more expensive headphone price tags and the Sonos Ace seems to be positioned at $599 lately, as well.
