Sonos's New Soundbar and Headphones Right Some of Its Wrongs - DTNS 5344

**Jason Howell** (0:04)
This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, September 1st, 2026 We tell you what you need to know, give you the important context, and help each other understand.

**Tom Merritt** (0:12)
Yes. Well, at least we try. Today, Sonos is back, baby. They got speakers, they got headphones, they got operating systems, all for you.

**Jason Howell** (0:22)
Hmm. Maybe the operating system is the most important part of that. We'll talk about it. I'm Jason Howell.

**Tom Merritt** (0:28)
I'm Tom Merritt.

**Jason Howell** (0:29)
Let's start with what you need to know with a big story.

**Tom Merritt** (0:34)
Yes.

**Jason Howell** (0:34)
As Tom said right there at the top, Sonos has announced a couple of new premium products, including a big push into artificial intelligence on its devices, which we'll talk about more from an open platform perspective. Very interesting. But first, the $450 ACE Ultra headphones. That's one of the products they announced. And they now integrate more directly with Sonos speakers than the previous ACE headphone model. They include Wi-Fi built in, which I found a lot of people were kind of hoping for, saying, I'm not going to buy these unless they have Wi-Fi. Well, there you go. So that basically means that users can move audio from a Sonos speaker system or turntable to the headphones directly and then back. And you can do that kind of with the push of a button. So it's very well integrated apparently. Sonos also claims improved ANC, this noise cancellation, a 35-hour battery, and replaceable magnetic ear pads. So if they wear out, I suppose you can just pop some new ones in there.
There's the $700 Beam Ultra Soundbar, which features upward facing speakers or upward firing speakers. Nine drivers support for true 7.1.2 Dolby Atmos, which is nice. There's also a new AI speech enhancement feature with four degrees of dialogue clarity. If you want to clean up the dialogue of the movie you're watching or something like that.
Sonos Fabric is a system that allows you to use a pair of Move 2 and play wireless speakers as rear surrounds with the system when they're installed in the same room as the soundbar. They actually use high frequency sound to help when you place the speaker somewhere in the room that will adjust it, the sound clarity and kind of the dynamics of the sound system to the room automatically. And it uses that high frequency sound to do location for that system. And then finally, powering the soundbar is the newly renamed Sonos 27 OS, formally named Platform, which introduces its own native voice assistant for audio playback, plus the option to connect to third-party models. So you can connect to ChatGBT, Gemini, ALEXA, Amazon's Assistant Plus for other tasks. Sonos says it isn't giving any model preferential treatment on its platform. And in the future, users can expect to create AI agents with custom models and voices as well. Agents on your sound bar. I guess we should get used to things like that.

**Tom Merritt** (3:15)
I can see that being incredibly useful if you're like, I want to pull in new releases when they happen, put them in this playlist. There's all kinds of things I can see you're using agents for. Obviously, it's not coding. It's not a coding thing you can do here.

**Jason Howell** (3:27)
Why can't you code with your sound bar, Tom? Are you saying that's ridiculous?

**Tom Merritt** (3:31)
Are we even in the 21st century? But no, I think a lot of people will poo poo the agents part of this because buzzword.

**Jason Howell** (3:39)
Occurrence.

**Tom Merritt** (3:40)
But I think I can imagine some things where it's like, settle down from the hype around agents and just think like, oh, I would like to be able to describe something I want my Sonos to do, and you'd be able to do that, and multimodal will make it happen, right?

**Jason Howell** (3:55)
That's an interesting point, and it's true, and I probably fall victim to this sometimes too. When we think of AI agents, we think of all of these complex systems and everything, but really at the end of the day, what is it in a system like this? It's, oh, this feature or this setting or this shortcut doesn't exist. Maybe I can just use my voice to say, I want it to do this thing. How can it? And it does it, and that's actually a pretty cool option.

**Tom Merritt** (4:22)
Yeah, kind of like routines on the Amazon Echo, but more capable, right? Like, yeah, of course, you don't want, you're probably not going to use your Sonos to go do your grocery shopping or something like that, right? It's not that that kind of agentic stuff. Yeah, I think this is a big play for Sonos to get back into the mind share of being good at this. And the headphone integration is probably the most important part of that, where I think a lot of people looked at the previous Ace Headphones as like Sonos, they're kind of backsliding. You used to be able to use all their stuff. That was the dream of Sonos. We have some really old Sonos speakers, and the fun part about them was it was just dead easy to be like, play this on the Sonos and it played it on the Sonos. So being able to tap the headphones and say, oh yeah, bring it to the headphones, that is the kinds of things Sonos used to be known for.