After a few months with just partial compatibility, the Sonos Ace headphones now work with all of the company’s soundbars and can take advantage of the TV audio swap feature. That’s the feature by which audio will be routed to the Sonos headphones instead of the soundbar itself, which is great for some private listening when you don’t want to disturb someone else.
It’s the sort of feature that Google has had with its earbuds and Google TV devices, and that Apple TV has enjoyed with the various AirPods models. The main difference here is that Sonos isn’t an operating system in the same regard, so it has to handle the audio handoff a little further downstream. And so now the Ace can intercept audio via the Sonos Ray and Sonos Beam, in addition to the Sonos Arc, which worked at launch.
Importantly, Sonos notes that the TV audio swap now works on Android as well as iOS.
To take advantage of the feature, you’ll need to make sure your Sonos app is updated, and that your Sonos system itself is on the latest firmware.
In addition to the TV audio swap improvements, the latest Sonos app update also brings the following:
- A tool to downgrade an S2 system to S1
- Improved smoothness and reduced latency for group volume controls
- Added mute buttons for individual speakers in a group
- Added group volume controls from the now-playing screen
- The ability to clear the queue
- Better performance for hefty queues
- Better reliability for speech enhancement and night mode settings
That’s a sizable update, and another step in the right direction after a summer of sorrow for Sonos that followed a major revamping of the platform that came just ahead of the Sonos Ace launch in the spring. That revamp saw a rewrite of the Sonos app that led to some staple features disappearing and others breaking — and customers wondering just what in the heck had happened to their beloved company. The major sea change went so badly that CEO Patrick Spence issued an apology, albeit a couple months after the problems already were more than apparent.
This latest app update also comes a day before Sonos is set to announce its second-quarter 2024 earnings.
