The Sonos Ace Ultra headphones and Beam Ultra soundbar are smarter than I expected

Nathan Ingraham for Engadget After a roughly 45-minute presentation where Sonos CEO Tom Conrad announced the Ace Ultra headphones, Beam Ultra soundbar and big software updates to the platform, the company started taking the assembled press around for demos where I got a chance to hear the new hardware and get some examples of how the new Sonos 27 operating system will enable new interactions with the company's hardware. Beam Ultra and integration with portable surround speakers Nathan Ingraham for Engadget We got to hear the Sonos Beam Ultra in a few configurations: on its own, with a pair of Play speakers as surrounds and with the Ace Ultra headphones. It's hard to tell in such an open space how much difference the new speaker array in the Beam Ultra contributes to a sense of immersion — but it sounds loud, powerful and clear. We watched a scene from F1 that had a lot going on, including announcer voiceovers, dialogue in the car and lots of ambient sounds like engine noise, helicopters flying over, fireworks and more. It was all nicely balanced, with a pretty impressive bass presence given that there wasn't a subwoofer connected. I couldn't really get a sense for how much the side- and upwards-firing drivers contributed to this, because there weren't really walls or a ceiling for audio to bounce off.  We also got to see Sonos Fabric, the technology that lets its products have more context about where they're placed and what is around them, in action. The demo team brought in a pair of Play speakers which were placed on a table behind the couch we were seated on. As promised, they automatically connected to the system and added rear surround audio. That made a huge difference in the overall immersion; panning audio was much more noticeable, and there was nice reverb on the announcer voices as well. Finally, we were also able to try the Ace Ultra's ability to grab audio from the soundbar and play it through the headphones instead. The original Ace was able to do this as well (at least after some long-awaited software updates), so this isn't a major new feature. But as someone who has never watched a movie at home with a pair of headphones, they did a great job reproducing all of the audio madness from the F1 scene as well. As if anticipating my complaints, Sonos offered a more in-depth session where I got to hear the Beam Ultra in a smaller room rather than the boomy conference space where the event took place. As before, I got to hear the Beam Ultra playing on its own as well as with surrounds. The first demo was music only and showed off the speakers' Atmos chops — I really got a sense of place with the various instruments; it felt like they were physically in specific areas across the room, with impressive separation from a fairly compact soundbar. I also got to watch a scene from Sinners with the surround speakers hooked up, and this was by far the most impressive demo of the day. The scene in question used lots of rotating camera shots and the audio followed it to match, again showing off impressive "placement" of the many competing audio elements. While the Beam Ultra was the star of the demo, I came away quite impressed with what the smaller Play speakers are able to offer from a surround point of view. The fact that they can easily be grouped with a soundbar and then removed to use as portable speakers elsewhere makes them even more versatile than they were when they launched. AI and software updates Sonos had a lot to say about AI and how it'll be integrated throughout the Sonos 27 OS that runs all of its products. Following the Beam Ultra demo, Sonos started by showing us how its updated voice assistant works. As we've seen with updates like Alexa+, it's all about talking with natural language and having your AI assistant know what you mean. In a demo, this meant you could ask Sonos to "play that acoustic live Nirvana album" and MTV Unplugged in New York will start up without any confusion. Another good example was asking the speaker to play "All Along the Watchtower" — it started up with the Jimi Hendrix Experience cover, but asking the speaker to "play the Bob Dylan version" switched it up seamlessly. The assistant was built having deep music knowledge in mind, but Sonos says it can also answer general queries as well.  I also got to see how Sonos 27 works with your AI model of choice. Thanks to an open model context protocol (MCP), it's trivial to set up your system to respond to commands from Claude, ChatGPT and all the rest. In a demo, Sonos showed me three speakers in an example household connected to both ChatGPT and Claude, and natural language queries to play music, adjust volume, moving tunes to different rooms and so forth all worked as you'd expect.  Finally, we got to see how custom agents will work with Sonos when they launch last year. There was a preview of a few different identities that you can create directly in the Sonos app by defining what you want it to sound like and what personality you're after as well as what model you want it to use to find this info. For example, there was a French chef personality that would give you recipe suggestions after you tell it what food you have on hand; you could also then ask the assistant to play some appropriate music. The custom agents can tap into the Sonos voice assistant knowledge to power requests like that, for example. It's pretty early days for custom agents — unlike just about everything else announced here, you won't be able to try them at all yet.  Ace Ultra is what the company's original headphones should have been Nathan Ingraham for Engadget Finally, I got a chance to hear the Ace Ultra in action. I can't critically evaluate them based on a five-minute demo session, but they are as light and comfortable as the original Ace but with a host of new features. Chief among them is the capability for them to show up in your Sonos system as if they're just another speaker. You'll need to have one standard Sonos speaker in your setup for this to work, as the company explained that the headphones use that speaker as its brains essentially.  But once that's set, you can take any audio playing and send it to the Ace Ultra headphones. If you are near a playing speaker, pressing and holding a button on the headphones transfers the audio. Pressing and holding it again sends it back to a speaker near you — and if you go to another room entirely and then try this, it'll go to a speaker in proximity to you, not just back to the original speaker.  Features like this and the new portable surrounds feature are probably the things I'm most excited about coming out of this demo day. They solve real problems or make it even easier to listen to your music wherever you want, which is the whole promise of Sonos.  Meanwhile, audio quality seemed quite good, as it should be for $450 headphones, and the ANC improvements seemed significant — the headphones basically shut out all the din and buzz of the crowded demo area. There's a lot we still need to evaluate to see how these headphones fit into a competitive market with well-regarded options from giants like Sony and Bose, but I think Sonos is offering a more unique proposition for its loyal users than it did with the original Ace.