Sonos is entering the headphone market with a R12 999 device, part of an effort to turn the home-speaker company into a broader maker of consumer technology.

The new Sonos Ace, announced on Tuesday, is an over-ear model that’s designed to compete with high-end headphones from Apple, Sony and Bose. The device will go on sale on 5 June in black or white options. Though the Ace doesn’t look radically different to rival products, Sonos plans to tout the audio performance and its ability to work closely with the rest of the company’s line-up.

“This has been the most requested product from our customers of all time,” Sonos CEO Patrick Spence said in an interview. “Tens of thousands of customers have reached out asking for headphones, and that’s pretty amazing.”

He sees a $5-billion market opportunity for the Ace and believes Sonos can succeed in the space, even with entrenched rivals.

“We are winning in categories that are declining — like sound bars — and now we’re entering a category that is growing double-digits,” Spence said. “There are a lot of reasons why this is good for our customers and good for our business.”

Sonos could use a boost. Earlier this month, the company posted a wider quarterly loss than predicted, sending its shares tumbling. Revenue declined 17%.

Spence, who became CEO in 2017, is betting on the headphones to bring more people into the company’s ecosystem and shore up revenue. Sonos anticipates generating as much as $1.7-billion in total sales during fiscal 2024, which runs through to September.

Bluetooth and Wi-Fi

The Ace offers both Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connections. The first one is used for pairing with smartphones, laptops and other devices, while the latter handles a “swap” feature that lets the headphones stream audio from a TV via a connected Arc sound bar. It won’t work with Sonos’s cheaper sound bars or speakers for engineering reasons, but will link up with newer models over time, Spence said.

Spence said the swap feature will set the Ace headphones apart from the competition and prod people to buy more Sonos devices. The company expects to generate $100-million from new products this financial year, though Spence declined to give unit sales projections for the headphones.

The Ace’s noise-cancellation feature and comfort will be other selling points, Spence said.

Read: Sonos plans huge overhaul of its product portfolio

“The thing that will be surprising to people is just how comfortable they are,” he said, adding that this issue has been a source of complaints for rival headphones. He also said the sound quality will set the Ace apart from the AirPods Max, Apple’s $549 over-ear headphones.

The Ace has eight microphones, stainless steel arms holding the ear cups, vegan leather ear cushions and spatial audio. Like AirPods and other headphones, they have head tracking. That means the sound adjusts as users move their head around. There’s also a feature coming later this year that improves surround sound by mapping the space a person is in — similar to how some smart speakers work.

The headphones have a slew of hardware controls, including a media slider for volume that doubles as the button for retrieving audio from sound bars. There’s also a button for switching between noise cancellation and what the company calls “Aware mode”, its version of AirPods’ Transparency, which allows users to better hear outside noise. The headphones have 30 hours of battery life and can gain three hours of charge in three minutes.

The headphones are the first in a series of several new hardware products that Sonos is planning for the next few years. On Tuesday, the company is also rolling out a Roam 2 mobile speaker with improved hardware controls and simpler Bluetooth pairing, addressing complaints about the first version.

In addition, Sonos is working on a TV set-top box, in-ear headphones that more closely rival AirPods, a large party speaker and updates to its sound bars, according to people with knowledge of the company’s road map. In the interview, Spence called the television market “very interesting for the long term” and said that he’s “open to driving further innovation” in headphones. — (c) 2024 Bloomberg LP