There continues to be chatter about Sonos releasing its long-rumored and much-anticipated first headphones. In the company’s fiscal fourth-quarter earnings release, Sonos CEO Patrick Spence, without directly mentioning a headphones product, hinted that Sonos would be entering “a new multibillion-dollar category in the second half of the year [2024] that will complement our current offering, delight customers and drive immediate revenue.” And Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported that Sonos was readying “$400-plus headphones to rival Apple and Bose” for an April release that has now turned into a June release, according to a recent update he posted.
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On top of that, Gurman is predicting that Sonos will release the Roam 2, an updated version of its smallest portable speaker, alongside the headphones in June. “The main new addition is a touch-sensitive panel on top for music and volume control, matching the interface on Sonos’ Era 100 and Era 300 speakers,” Gurman wrote in his Power On newsletter. “There’s also a hardware fix for Bluetooth glitches that have plagued many users of the original model.”
Compared with the original Roam and Move speakers, I thought Sonos did a much better job with the Bluetooth side of things in its larger Move 2 portable speaker. (Sonos portable speakers can tap into your Wi-Fi-based multi-room Sonos audio system when at home and use Bluetooth when away from your home network, connecting directly to a Bluetooth-enabled audio device such as smartphone or tablet.) But Gurman says Sonos is in the process of revamping its app to improve the user experience with its portable speakers.
“Internally, Sonos has been grappling with problems with new software for setting up and operating its portable products,” Gurman writes. “So it has made some compromises. The new app, initially, will only support the headphones and Roam 2. It will then get an update later to work with the Move 1 and 2 products, as well as the first-generation Roam.”
Sonos wireless headphones have been rumored for years, and the company was awarded a patent for them in August 2020. Presumably, you would stream audio to them over Wi-Fi in your home and over Bluetooth on the road. However, not much else is known about them other than that they’re expected to be premium headphones that cost upward of $450. One would hope that for that price they would also have great noise canceling and voice-calling capabilities. But we’ll have to wait and see just what Sonos has in store for us.
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