Though it still baffles me from a technological point of view, the current obsession with wired earbuds and headphones is showing no signs of slowing down. Some say the trend began with a 2019 photo of fashion model Bella Hadid wearing Apple’s iconic white wired EarPods. Others say it got a boost after Kamala Harris raised the spectre of Bluetooth hacking.

But when it comes to truly mass-market awareness, it’s hard to overestimate the influence of the Sony Walkman’s starring role in the fourth season of Stranger Things, which debuted in 2022.

It’s taken four years for Sony to capitalize on that gift-wrapped opportunity, but Sony has now revived the MDR-3L2 — the wired, on-ear headphones that shipped with the very first Walkman model in 1979 — but with a modern twist.

Instead of using a traditional 3.5mm plug, the new MDR-3R ($59.99) headphones use a smartphone-friendly USB-C connection. In a nod to how we all use headphones these days, they include an inline remote-and-mic, so you can take calls and control volume and playback without reaching for your phone.

Shop for Sony MDR-3R

But in almost every other respect, the MDR-3R are the spitting image of the MDR-3L2, right down to the drivers, which Sony claims have been tuned to closely match the sound signature of the original, albeit with a few tweaks “made to suit modern listening preferences.” Sony says it dug into its vaults to unearth the original MDR-3L2 blueprints, which became the basis of the new model.

The MDR-3R even ship with two sets of ear cushions: the original blue and the day-glo orange that became a favorite option on later Walkman headphone models throughout the 80s.

Eagle-eyed Stranger Things fans will quickly point out that even though Max Mayfield indeed wore a Sony Walkman WM-8 while famously listening to Kate Bush’s Running Up That Hill on repeat, her headphones were actually a set of Realistic Nova 45, not Sony’s MDR-3L2.

Still, that hasn’t stopped Sony from partnering with Netflix on a limited-edition Stranger Things MDR-3R ($79.99) that features an engraved Stranger Things logo, plus red and black earpads.

Shop for Sony MDR-3R Stranger Things

Sony was kind enough to send me a set of regular MDR-3R so I could try them. Despite my staunch preference for wireless audio, I can’t lie: Nostalgia is a powerful thing, and I genuinely enjoyed the way these headphones instantly transported me back to 1981, the year I got my first Walkman.

Related:

Things really have come full circle. When Sony released the first Walkman along with the MDR-3L2 headphones, their ultra-small-and-light design stood in stark contrast to the hulking over-ear models of the 70s. And that was the first thing I noticed about the MDR-3R.

At just 1.4 ounces (not including the cable), they’re incredibly light and comfortable. For the better part of the last decade, I’ve been reviewing wireless headphones that weigh six to nine times more. Donning the MDR-3R reminded me that while the wireless, noise-canceling era has given us much, it has also encumbered us with (relatively) massive devices.

Shop for Sony MDR-3R

The next thing I noticed was the sound.

If you’ve spent most of your life listening via earbuds (whether wired or wireless), you’ve gotten used to sound reproduction that starts very close to your ear canal. If those earbuds have a set of silicone tips, that effect is even more pronounced.

The result is music that sounds intimate, almost as if it’s inside your head. The MDR-3R will inevitably sound less immersive and less intimate. Because the foam cushions provide almost no acoustic seal, bass response is mild at best. On a track like Billie Eilish’s bad guy, the bass bumps, but it doesn’t thump.

Outside sounds can get in pretty easily. And if you crank the volume, there’s a good chance others will hear your music.

I’m not saying the MDR-3R sound bad — I actually really enjoy their balance and detail, which make for a surprisingly satisfying listening experience — but if you’re hoping that somehow the 80s-vintage tech is going to deliver a magical listening experience that modern audio gear lacks, you may be disappointed.

That puts the MDR-3R in roughly the same category as today’s wireless open-ear earbuds — perfect for casual listening and maintaining awareness of what’s going on around you, but they’re not going to extract the most from your music or offer any kind of noise isolation.

The inline remote works well. The buttons are easy to find and have a very positive tactile click when you press them. The mic does a good job of picking up your voice, but there’s little in the way of background noise suppression, so you may need to lift it closer to your mouth in loud environments.

Not that it will likely matter to those who are enamored with the MDR-3R’s retro design, but if you’ve become accustomed to AirPods or any other wireless earbuds, keep in mind that the cable will snag on clothing and other objects, the headphones don’t fold up, and you’ll need to be careful with the
USB-C plug — avoiding strain on that connection will save you an expensive phone repair.

Speaking of the plug, the USB-C connection has an embedded digital-to-analog converter (DAC) that can handle 16- or 24-bit audio, up to 48kHz, which means it should work with virtually any phone, tablet, or computer with a USB-C port — no special software or app needed.

I asked Sony if it had any plans to bring back the version with a 3.5mm analog plug — not at this time.

Given the massive resurgence of interest in de-digitizing our lives in favor of retro tech — eBay’s used Walkman listings are going for as much as $1,150 — perhaps the question I should have asked was, will Sony bring back the cassette Walkman itself?

It might be a long shot, but stranger things have happened.

Shop for Sony MDR-3R

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It doesn’t take a PhD in psychology to understand that the resurgence of interest in vinyl, CDs, vintage iPods, and even cassette tapes is less about sound quality, and more about people’s desire to feel connected to their music in a way that streaming services can’t offer.

The tactile experience of holding an album, dropping the needle, or pushing on a mechanical play button scratches an itch some of us didn’t even realize we had.

But since it’s unlikely that we’re going to ditch streaming entirely, the question is whether there’s a way to bring at least some of that real-world experience to our favorite streaming services.

I’ve found two products that attempt to solve this problem. One is a relatively affordable product you can buy right now and the other is currently a crowdfunded project with a whopper of a price tag.

Tuneshine ($199.99 and up), tuneshinerocks.com

Think of Tuneshine like an album display stand for streaming music. It’s a 6.3” x 6.3” square LED display that shows your currently playing album artwork as a bright, albeit very pixelated piece of art. When the next song starts, the Tuneshine updates to the new album cover. That’s it.

The back is made from a solid slab of beech wood (or you can upgrade to walnut for an extra $20), while the front is a thin layer of RGB pixels that form a 64 x 64 grid.

There are no on-board controls — just a USB-C power port carved into the wood (it comes with a cable and an AC adapter). All of the settings are controlled via the free Tuneshine app for iOS or Android.

At the moment, Tuneshine works best with multiroom audio systems like Sonos, Wiim, and Roon, but it also works directly with Spotify and Apple Music. Some services, like Tidal, Deezer, Pandora, and YouTube Music can be accessed via Last.fm.

Setting it up with Sonos, as I did with the walnut evaluation unit Tuneshine provided, gives you the best of all worlds. Not only can Sonos play music from just about every service on the planet, but the Tuneshine app also lets you specify which Sonos speaker will act as the DJ.

I placed the Tuneshine on our fireplace mantle and set it to synchronize with our “Living Room” in Sonos. After that, it seamlessly displayed low-res, but highly colorful versions of the album art I could see in the Sonos app. It worked for all of my connected services as well as tracks from our own networked-stored music library.

To appreciate Tuneshine, you need to think of it as a mood or decor enhancer. A better name might have been TuneVibes, because in truth, it doesn’t give you an album cover you can stare at, ponder over, or admire.

Any text needs to be a main graphic element, otherwise it’s completely unreadable — Lorde’s Pure Heroine is a perfect Tuneshine album cover. On The Police’s Greatest Hits, “The Police” takes up a full third of the image and is clear and distinct on the Tuneshine. The words “Greatest Hits” barely register a small smear of grey.

Tuneshine works best as a reminder of an album you’ve already seen a million times. It’s a lot less effective when you’re unfamiliar with the album that’s playing.

I think it’s fair to say that no one needs a Tuneshine, but after spending a few weeks with one, I kinda don’t want to give it up.

Spine (£849, or approximately $1,100 USD), Kickstarter, U.K.-only

At the other end of the spectrum from Tuneshine is Spine, a 30-inch-wide, brushed aluminum-wrapped touchscreen designed to turn your streaming music library into a virtual CD collection that can be seen from across the room, and browsed/played with just the swipe of your finger.

Spine is the brainchild of Ricardo Amorim, founder of Spine Music, and he’s currently testing the waters for Spine on Kickstarter, where early backers can pledge £849 to receive one of the first Spine units, which are targeted to ship in July 2027. The first batch will only ship within the U.K., but Amorim is hopeful he’ll be able to add other markets for future production runs.

Like Tuneshine, Spine connects via Wi-Fi and uses your account credentials to synchronize with your music services. But Spine’s secret sauce is the way it displays content. Instead of simply pulling the album art, Spine recreates it as a virtual CD jewel case, complete with a real-world accurate rendering of the CD’s spine (thus the name), and stacks it on a horizontally scrolling shelf.

Amorim’s belief is that you probably have years of embedded memories of your favorite CDs, sorted in some kind of physical rack; you’re used to seeing their spines and grabbing them. Spine brings back this experience without bringing back the CDs, or the potentially massive amounts of physical storage space they’d need.

How much space could you save? Amorim says his team has tested real libraries of up to 10,000 albums. Spine can be wall-mounted, or placed on a flat surface.

Once you’ve identified the CD you want by its spine, a tap flips it to a frontal view so you can see the album art, and a follow-up tap begins playback. Sadly, the back of the album isn’t available.

Spine’s physical presence and its price are both audacious, but it’s worth understanding its current limitations before you dive in.

At the moment, Spine only works with Apple Music, Tidal, or Spotify. You need to have both the streaming music app and the Spine Music app loaded on your phone, because when you trigger playback from Spine, it’s actually a remote command to your phone, not to your sound system.

This keeps Spine very flexible: it doesn’t matter if you’ve been playing your music via headphones, a bluetooth speaker, an AirPlay connection, or possibly Google Cast, that’s the playback path that will be used when you interact with Spine. However, it also means that, for now at least, Spine’s entire raison d’être is to provide a pleasing tactile and visual way to browse a defined collection of songs and albums, from a single source.

You can’t use Spine to control volume, pause a playing stream, skip tracks, select a different speaker, or show you what’s currently playing if you didn’t initiate playback from Spine. There’s no way to search within your collection and no way to search or browse content that lives outside your collection e.g. Spotify’s Today’s Top Hits.

The closest analogy I can come up with is a jukebox, but even that doesn’t quite describe the Spine experience, since a jukebox typically lets you select and play individual tracks. Spine, on the other hand, shows you full album covers, even if your collection only includes a single song from an album. Seeing the spine for Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, could mean you added the entire album, or just your favorite songs; there’s no way to know without checking your phone.

Spine’s support for Apple Music and Tidal is excellent: The system can automatically look for changes to your library (or you can push them manually) and triggering playback is a one-tap process. The Spotify integration is clunkier: You need to use the third-party TuneMyMusic service both initially and any time your collection changes. Playback requires a tap on Spine, then another tap on a pop-up notification on your phone.

There’s a big part of me that thinks $1,100 USD is a wildly high price to pay for Spine, given its limitations. And yet, I haven’t seen any other product that does what Spine can do. For someone who wants a way to proudly display and browse their digital music collection (and who wants the bragging rights that would almost certainly come with owning a Spine), maybe it’s an entirely justifiable expense.

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When it comes to multiroom wireless speakers, there’s Sonos and then there’s everyone else. That’s hardly a surprise. After all, Sonos not only defined the category when it launched more than 20 years ago, but has also remained laser focused on it ever since.

Does that mean you should blindly buy Sonos products? Absolutely not. You should buy them (or buy another brand) with your eyes wide open! To help you do that, here’s a snapshot shootout of the roughly comparable entry-level models from Sonos, Bose, Denon, and Wiim: Sonos Era 100, Bose Lifestyle Ultra Speaker, Denon Home 200, and Wiim Sound.

I’ll talk about pricing, design, features, performance, and your options for expanding beyond a single speaker.

Spoiler alert: a lot of product comparison articles choose a “winner.” I’m not going to do that. Instead, I’ll let these speakers, ahem, speak for themselves, then I’ll offer a few thoughts on how you can decide which one (or maybe none) deserves a spot in your home.

Price

I’m sure you’ll be able to find discounts on these speakers throughout the year and especially during retail events like Amazon Prime Day or Black Friday, but for the purposes of a fair comparison, I’m sticking with the manufacturer’s suggested retail price or MSRP:

• Sonos Era 100: $219 USD / $289 CAD

• Wiim Sound: $299 USD / $429 CAD

• Bose Lifestyle Ultra Speaker: $349 USD / $449 CAD

• Denon Home 200: $399 USD / $599 CAD

A few notes here. First, if you’ve been thinking about the Bose Lifestyle Ultra Speaker and you could have sworn it was only $299, not $349, you’re not crazy. In May 2026, Bose launched the Lifestyle Ultra Speaker at $299 and then increased it to $349 on October 12 without saying a word.

Second, Sonos and Wiim make less expensive versions of their products that omit some features. The Era 100 SL ($189 USD / $249 CAD) doesn’t have mics, and the Sound Lite ($229 USD / $329 CAD) doesn’t have a touchscreen or a remote. I’ll talk about why these might be better choices in a moment.

It’s easy to be lured by the Era 100’s relatively low price, but obviously, there’s more to the story.

Shop for Sonos Era 100

Shop for Wiim Sound

Shop for Bose Lifestyle Ultra Speaker

Shop for Denon Home 200

Design

Looks are obviously subjective, but I think all four models look great. They all use a combination of plastics and fabrics, except the all-plastic Sonos Era 100. This gives the Era 100 an edge in terms of versatility. Fabrics can get stained and they don’t do well with rough handling (or cat scratching), whereas plastic is pretty robust.

If I were to pick one of these models as a kitchen speaker, for instance, it would be the Era 100, no question.

The Era 100 also has (by a hair) the smallest overall dimensions.

When it comes to colors, Sonos, Bose, and Wiim stick with the traditional black and white options, while Denon offers a slightly warmer “stone” finish. For an extra $30, you can buy the Driftwood Sand edition of the Lifestyle Ultra Speaker, which incorporates a natural wood base to complement its beige/brown colors.

All four feature top-mounted controls for playback and volume adjustments, and all possess at least one kind of external input for connecting other audio sources.

Only the Wiim Sound has illuminated top controls, and it’s also the only speaker of the bunch to come with a built-in, front-mounted touchscreen display and its own wireless Bluetooth remote control.

Each model has the option of being wall- or stand-mounted, but none come with their own hardware for doing so.

How do they work?

Shop for Denon Home 200

Sonos, Denon, and Wiim take a similar approach to their multiroom speakers: Their mobile apps are command central. They help you set up the speakers on your home Wi-Fi network, they provide access to the settings and software updates, and, crucially, they’re a one-stop shop for finding and playing music from across a wide range of streaming services and any sources you may have connected.

If you own more than one speaker (from the same brand), the app coordinates them — letting you play the same content on all speakers, different content on every speaker, or anything in between.

Bose takes a slightly different approach. It also has a dedicated mobile app for setup, audio adjustments, and firmware updates, but there is no music or speaker management built-in. Instead, Bose expects that you’ll use your preferred music app, like Spotify or Tidal, and then choose your Bose Lifestyle speaker from the app’s built-in picker. These pickers can be native to the app (like Spotify Connect) or they can use Apple AirPlay or Google Cast.

This arrangement can get tricky when you’ve got multiple people in your home. For example, my daughter can’t adjust the Qobuz playlist I’ve chosen because the music is streaming directly from my phone to the Bose speaker. Moreover, if I start an AirPlay stream on a Bose speaker and leave the house, the stream leaves with me.

If that sounds a lot like how Bluetooth works, you’re not wrong; they work similarly.

On Sonos, Denon, or Wiim, my daughter could edit my playlist list or replace it. When you use their companion apps, these speakers can pull content from music services themselves, not your phone. In fact, with Sonos, you can manage your speakers from anywhere, using the Sonos web app.

iPhone owners, read this

Shop for Wiim Sound

I’m a big fan of Wiim’s audio products, but its newest models, including the Wiim Sound, Wiim Sound Lite, and Wiim Bar, come with a huge caveat for iPhone users: they don’t support Apple AirPlay.

If you’re happy using the Wiim Home app (which is excellent), or Bluetooth to connect to your speaker, the lack of AirPlay might be something you can overlook. Just keep in mind that when Sonos’ 2024 app redesign rendered many of its products much harder to use, a lot of folks resorted to AirPlay and many of them still prefer it.

Related:

Which music sources do they support?

Shop for Sonos Era 100

Bose has no “native” music support, which means the Bose app isn’t used to sign in to or browse services like Spotify or Apple Music. Instead, as I described above, the Lifestyle Ultra Speaker works with any third-party music app on your phone, via Bluetooth, Apple AirPlay, or Google Cast.

If you want to play music from your personal library, you’ll need a third-party app like Roon, BubbleUPnP, or mConnect.

Denon’s Home 200, via its HEOS compatibility, works with Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn, Native SiriusXM, Qobuz, Tidal, Deezer, AWA, SoundCloud, and iHeartRadio. The Home 200 is the only speaker in the group that can read music from an attached USB storage device (via the USB-C port).

The Wiim Home app has even greater support for services. It includes the full HEOS list, plus Spotify, YouTube Music, vTuner, Calm Radio, Napster, QQMusic, RadioParadise, SoundMachine, KKBox, BBC Radio, Plex, Hotmix, and Presto Music.

Sonos has the largest collection of natively compatible music services, with everything that Wiim Home supports, plus dozens more. It’s also the only multiroom system with native support for Apple Music’s full collection of lossless, hi-res, and Dolby Atmos songs.

HEOS, Wiim Home, and the Sonos app support direct access to personal music libraries on your home network.

One thing to note if you’re a specs nerd: Only the Denon Home 200 and Wiim Sound support hi-res audio up to 24-bit/192kHz. The Sonos Era 100 and Bose Lifestyle Ultra Speaker hit their ceilings at 24-bit/48kHz.

How smart are these smart speakers?

Each of these speakers works with voice commands, but how they do it couldn’t be more different.

The Denon Home 200 is the only device in the group that works as an Apple Siri-powered smartspeaker, but there’s a major catch: You need to own at least one Apple HomePod (or HomePod Mini) and it has to be plugged into power and connected to the same network as the Home 200. Without that prerequisite, the Home 200 can’t respond to voice commands at all. It has a physical switch to kill the mics.

The Wiim Sound has no on-board mics for voice commands. Instead, you use the included Wiim Voice Remote 2 (which looks suspiciously like Apple’s Siri Remote for the Apple TV) to issue commands to Amazon Alexa. It’s not as convenient as a true hands-free design, but there’s also no fear that the speaker will be constantly monitoring voices.

The Sonos Era 100 gives you the option of enabling Amazon Alexa and/or Sonos’ in-house assistant, Sonos Voice Control, with both a physical mic kill switch and a touch control for mic muting. It will also work with Sonos’ as-yet-unreleased Sonos 27voice generative AI voice assistant.

Finally, Bose’s Lifestyle Ultra Speaker works with Amazon Alexa and it’s compatible with the newer Alexa+ (where that service is available). I’ve been using Alexa+ for about eight months and it’s been a game changer. Gone are the days of constant “I’m sorry, I didn’t understand,” responses. It’s still not perfect -- especially for music control — but it’s way better than the other options. Only one problem if you’re given to fears of surveillance: There’s a touch control to mute the mics, but no physical kill switch.

Can I plug in a turntable (or TV, or CD player, or …)

Shop for Bose Lifestyle Ultra Speaker

Yes! Each speaker has the option of connecting one external analog source, via a 3.5mm jack. Denon, Bose, and Wiim have these jacks built-in, but with Sonos, you need to buy the company’s optional $19 3.5mm-to-USB-C adapter.

One thing to keep in mind: If your turntable doesn’t have a “line” output (i.e., no built-in phono preamp), you’ll likely need a phono preamp to make the signal strong enough for the speakers.

What about Bluetooth?

Shop for Sonos Era 100

Absolutely. Each of these models can be connected to Bluetooth sources like phones, TVs, or Bluetooth turntables. The Wiim Sound, however, goes even further. Its Bluetooth feature is two-way, meaning the speaker can also send Bluetooth audio to headphones, earbuds, or any other Bluetooth-compatible products.

Wiim, Sonos, and Denon can share incoming Bluetooth audio with other same-brand speakers on your network — typically by grouping the additional speakers with the one that’s playing Bluetooth audio. The Bose Lifestyle Ultra Speakers are limited to stereo pairing — they can’t share Bluetooth audio with other Bose speakers in your home.

Expansion

Shop for Wiim Sound

One of the best reasons to buy a Wi-Fi speaker (like these) instead of a strictly Bluetooth speaker, is expandability. I touched on this briefly above in the “How do they work?” section, but it’s worth looking at the actual hardware options each brand offers.

Sonos is the leader here, by a mile. No other company sells as many compatible speakers and components. A home system that starts with an Era 100 can be expanded with soundbars, subwoofers, larger and more powerful speakers, smaller battery-powered portables, plus amplifiers and streaming add-ons for existing sound systems. Sonos even has a set of wireless headphones (the Sonos Ace Ultra), that can also be controlled by the Sonos app.

Related:

Next up is Denon. The Denon Home series isn’t quite as broad or deep as Sonos’ ecosystem (it doesn’t sell portables, for instance), but it does have a fascinating edge for hi-fi fans. Denon’s HEOS app, which controls the Home speakers, also controls several HEOS-compatible receivers and speakers from Denon and Marantz.

The Wiim Sound can be joined by several types of streaming music players, streaming amps, plus Wiim’s recently announced soundbar and wireless sub. It’s an ecosystem that still can’t rival Denon or Sonos, but at the pace it’s growing, that might not be the case for much longer.

Bose’s expandability for the Lifestyle Ultra Speaker is currently limited to the Bose Lifestyle Ultra Soundbar and the Lifestyle Ultra Subwoofer. It’s worth keeping in mind that while these products are designed to work together (you can add two Lifestyle Ultra Speakers and a Lifestyle Ultra Subwoofer to the Lifestyle Ultra Soundbar, for example), there’s no central management for how these components get grouped or ungrouped throughout your home — that’s handled by Apple AirPlay or Google Cast.

Sound quality

Shop for Denon Home 200

At first listen, these four speakers sound remarkably similar. They all sound great for their size, and they have similar thresholds for how loud they can get.

I have zero complaints about bass response, vocal clarity, or midrange performance. Power is tightly managed, reducing the chance of distortion, even at maximum volume.

Still, there were noticeable differences once I got deeper into my usual list of test tracks. For instance, there’s a strong correlation between the size of the speakers and the sound they produce.

The Denon Home 200 is the largest and so is its sound. It provides more powerful bass, and it has the widest soundstage of the group. It’s also the only speaker among the four that can play Dolby Atmos Music, directly from Amazon Music Unlimited and Tidal. At first I was skeptical that a single speaker, especially one as compact as the Home 200, could recreate the width, height, and depth of an Atmos Music track. The height portion is mild, but the extra width is truly impressive.

On the other end of the soundstage spectrum is the Bose Lifestyle Ultra Speaker. Its sound is more narrowly focused. That’s partly because it’s a mono speaker, (the other three are stereo), and partly because Bose opted to include an up-firing driver in the cabinet. That’s an odd choice, especially for a speaker that isn’t Dolby Atmos-compatible on its own. That top driver comes in handy when you pair a set of these speakers with the new Bose Lifestyle Ultra Soundbar — it helps deliver Atmos height effects — but it doesn’t do much when the speaker is operating solo.

Shop for Bose Lifestyle Ultra Speaker

Still, I’ve got to hand it to Bose. It knows how to get lots of bass from small enclosures, and the Lifestyle Ultra Speaker outperforms the Era 100 on low-end response.

The Wiim Sound sits somewhere between the Sonos Era 100 and the Denon Home 200 on all of these metrics. It’s got a fuller, wider sound than the Era 100, with slightly more pronounced bass, yet it stops shy of hitting the Home 200’s commanding performance.

Which brings me back to the Era 100. Once again, Sonos manages to pull off a Goldilocks move, by giving the Era 100 a fantastic price-to-sound-quality ratio. The Bose Lifestyle Ultra Speaker costs almost 60% more than the Era 100, but I don’t think it sounds 60% better. The Denon Home 200, on the other hand, costs 82% more than the Era 100, and while I don’t think it delivers 82% better performance, the sonic bump is noticeable.

A few quick notes on tuning:

• Sonos has a room calibration function called TruePlay, which you can further tweak with simple bass/treble adjustments.

• Denon lets you tune the Home 200 to match three possible speaker placements (near one wall, near two walls, or away from walls) plus simple bass/treble/width adjustments.

• Bose has simple bass/mids/treble/height adjustments.

• Wiim calls its room calibration RoomFit. It also has EQ presets, a multi-band equalizer, and even a parametric equalizer for those who know how to use one. You can even assign different EQ settings to your different sources (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, line-in, etc.), but it lacks a simple set of sliders.

How do you choose?

Shop for Sonos Era 100

Shop for Wiim Sound

Shop for Denon Home 200

Shop for Bose Lifestyle Ultra Speaker

As always, choosing the right product should start with your current budget, needs, and tastes, and keep your potential future needs in mind.

If you want a super-simple setup and you typically head straight to your favorite streaming app on your phone when you want to play music, the Bose Lifestyle Ultra Speaker is your best bet. It sounds great, it works really well as an Alexa+ smart speaker, you can run two of them for stereo, and it gives you Bluetooth, AirPlay, and Google Cast connections -- solid options whether you’re on an iPhone or an Android device. The analog input delivers even more versatility for devices like turntables.

However, if you’re keen to expand into a multiroom system with speakers all over your home, or if members of your family want to adjust what’s playing without blowing up your current playlist, the Lifestyle Ultra may not be the right speaker for you. Likewise, if you have access to multiple sources of music (e.g., Apple Music, Spotify, Audible, and a personal collection of ripped CDs), the Lifestyle Ultra doesn’t offer a single interface for managing them.

If, on the other hand, you’re planning to outfit your whole home over time, Sonos and Denon are a better fit. My bias is toward Sonos. It has a much broader range of devices to choose from, and it’s natively compatible with more streaming services. And despite its nearly two-year-long app redesign misadventure, its new direction looks genuinely innovative at a time when most wireless audio companies are content to keep offering the same features we’ve seen for the last decade.

Still, if you’re looking for the best sound quality from a single speaker, Denon’s Home 200 is the one to get.

Shop for Wiim Sound

The Wiim Sound is a real outlier. The built-in touch display is undeniably unique, and the Wiim Sound is also the only speaker in this group that comes with its own remote. This is the speaker you buy if you want to grow a multiroom system over time and you’re a bit of a renegade. Wiim’s products appeal to the same kind of people who choose Android phones over iPhones. They don’t mind sacrificing a little simplicity in order to get more control and way more features and customizations.

About the Sonos Era 100 SL and Wiim Sound Lite

Do you need a smart speaker? If the answer is no, the Sonos Era 100 SL saves you $30 on the cost of an Era 100, and all you lose is the ability to use the speaker for voice control. The good news is that if you already have an Alexa-powered speaker in your home (whether a Sonos model or someone else’s), it can still control an Era 100 SL. Same thing goes for Google Assistant and Siri — just add the Era 100 SL to your Google Home or Apple Home app.

The Wiim Sound Lite represents a different trade-off. For $70 less than the Sound, you lose the fun circular touchscreen and the Sound’s sleek voice-enabled remote. However, the absence of the touchscreen doesn’t change the Sound Lite’s capabilities, and if you want, you can always buy the Wiim Voice Remote ($20) or Voice Remote 2 ($40), both of which will give the Sound Lite smart speaker functionality via Amazon Alexa.

Either of these options are an excellent way to get the most out of a whole-home wireless speaker for a lot less money.

Transparency promotes trust. Please check out my disclosures page, which describes how I work with manufacturers to acquire product samples, and how I guard my editorial independence.

If you enjoyed this Loudmouth article, please consider subscribing. It supports my work and ensures you won’t miss out on future coverage.

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Race fans will happily talk your ear off about why they love a sport like Formula 1. The technical competition between teams, the personal stories (and fierce rivalries) of the drivers, or even the sometimes arcane rules that govern who wins and who loses. But none of that explains why people want to attend a Formula 1 race. The most likely answer: the visceral experience of seeing and hearing the fastest cars in the world roaring past you at over 200 mph as they vie for first place, only yards from where you’re standing.

And this week, a little more of that visceral experience will be available to those who watch from home: Apple TV — the exclusive U.S. broadcaster for the race series — is adding Dolby Atmos spatial audio to its F1 race weekend broadcasts, starting October 23, with the 2026 U.S. Grand Prix.

I haven’t heard it yet, but in his post for TechRadar, Jacob Krol describes it as a “night-and-day difference” from non-Atmos footage. Krol got to hear a Dolby Atmos mix of some previous races at the announcement event in New York City.

If you’re fortunate enough to have the right home theater gear and access to Dolby Atmos content, you’re probably used to how spatial audio can create a thrilling sense of immersion for movies and shows, by making the locations and movement of sounds match what you’re seeing on-screen. But typically, this effect is created after the fact in the studio, not captured in real time, which is what makes the F1 announcement so interesting: Apple has found a way to add spatial audio to race coverage using the same microphones and other gear that’s been used in the past.

It won’t be the first time a sporting event has been broadcast in Atmos: It’s been used for the Olympics, World Cup Soccer, NFL, and NBA matches. But in those examples, the realism centers around recreating the sound of the fans in the stadium. With F1, I think we can expect a more first-person perspective, with sound from the cars being the key ingredient.

This got me thinking about how we can add spatial audio to our own smartphone videos. Is it even possible? The answer is yes, and coincidentally, two new options for doing so have emerged in just the past month.

The built-in option: iPhone 16 or newer

If you own an iPhone 16 or newer, you’ve been able to record your videos in spatial audio since iOS 18 came out. In fact, it’s the default setting. To get the best results, you’ll need to record in landscape mode — this positions the microphones optimally for capturing sound coming from all directions.

Playback and editing are where things get a bit tricky. If you’ve got a set of supported Apple AirPods or Beats earbuds/headphones with head tracking, you should be able to play these recordings and hear the spatial audio, as long as you’re playing the video from the Photos app. It should also work if you’ve got iCloud enabled for Photos and play the videos on a Mac.

Unfortunately, Apple’s documentation is light on details when it comes to preserving the spatial audio on other devices. For example, you can AirPlay these videos to an Apple TV 4K, but doing so strips the metadata needed for the 3D aspect of the audio. Instead, you’ll hear regular stereo.

The external option: Sony’s ECM-AX10

Announced October 8, Sony’s ECM-AX10 is a small USB-C-powered microphone that can capture 3D audio in two different formats, plus stereo. It can be plugged into a variety of compatible iPhone and Android handsets and used to add spatial audio to your videos when you use Sony’s Spatial Audio Video Tool app for recording.

If you use Binaural mode, the four-capsule mic will record spatial audio as two-channel sound, specifically designed for headphones. Videos or audio recordings in Binaural mode will work with any set of stereo headphones or earbuds — even budget wired models.

If you use Ambisonics mode, the four-capsule mic records a four-channel 3D sound field, which Sony’s app can export in the open-source Eclipsa format developed by Samsung and Google.

No major music or movie streaming services or Blu-ray discs use Eclipsa yet, but for personal video purposes, that might not matter. Eclipsa audio can be uploaded to YouTube, and it can be decoded by recent Samsung smart TVs and Google TV/Android TV devices. The latest Samsung soundbars can also decode Eclipsa, and newer LG devices likely can too, though for some reason LG is being a bit coy about it (maybe because Eclipsa is Samsung’s baby).

In theory, this means you can hear your smartphone videos in spatial audio by uploading them to YouTube, then watching them on your TV via a Google TV device (as long as you have a multi-channel soundbar or AV receiver).

The creepy option: Ray-Ban Meta

The latest version of Meta’s controversial smart glasses are about to be the first consumer product that will record audio in Dolby Atmos. That’s Meta’s claim, and details are thin: Meta hasn’t given a date beyond ‘later this year’ or said how you’ll experience those recordings.

There’s a good chance they’ll arrive first on the company’s Meta Quest family of VR headsets, but we don’t know yet if other devices like your home theater will be compatible.

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Canadian wireless audio company, Bluesound, has just announced one of the rarest events in the streaming music world: It now offers native integration of Apple Music on devices powered by BluOS, the software at the heart of wireless products from Bluesound, NAD, PSB Speakers, DALI Loudspeakers, Cyrus, and Monitor Audio.

If this integration had lived up to the precedent set by Sonos, Bluesound users would have tons to celebrate: unfettered access to Apple Music’s entire catalog of lossless, hi-res, and Dolby Atmos tracks. Given Bluesound’s superior hi-res audio capabilities, it might have even surpassed Sonos’ implementation.

Sadly, that is not the case. Bluesound published a press release earlier today announcing the integration, but when I followed up with a rep to confirm the details, I was given this statement from the company:

Our implementation represents another option and convenience for Apple Music fans to enjoy. This implementation sits nicely alongside our longtime support of Airplay 2, capable of Lossless CD Quality, depending on the source. BluOS will always advocate for the highest quality experience, and we will also comply with the rules and guidance of the music services available on BluOS. The BluOS app displays the bitrate and format of the audio being streamed. Our integration uses the same toolkit made available to the broader 3rd party developer community. Currently, these tools provide lossy versions of the audio.

The representative separately confirmed that the integration doesn’t support Apple Music’s Dolby Atmos Music catalog.

So, to reiterate: You can now access Apple Music from within the BluOS app, but from a sound format and quality perspective, the integration won’t be any better than streaming from the Apple Music app on an iPhone via AirPlay.

Considering the Bluesound community’s heavy audiophile makeup, this is going to be a bitter pill to swallow. To understand why, let’s take a look at the streaming/wireless music landscape.

Native Apple Music integration: almost mythological

How rare is a full, native Apple Music integration? Until today, only one wireless audio company has ever offered it: Sonos.

It has never been clear to me why Sonos has enjoyed most-favored-nation status with Apple since shortly after the launch of Apple Music, but it is a relationship that has endured for more than a decade.

During that time, we’ve seen lots of companies develop multiroom systems that compete with Sonos: Sony, Bose, Wiim, Denon (HEOS), Samsung, LG, Amazon, Google, and JBL. None have been able to offer their customers a truly native Apple Music experience with all the fixings.

Why does native matter?

You can play Apple Music on almost any set of wireless speakers. With Bluetooth or AirPlay, it’s easy — almost trivially easy — to do it. But these two methods usually1 prevent you from enjoying two of Apple Music’s biggest selling points: lossless audio, with up to hi-res quality, and Dolby Atmos Music.

AirPlay and Bluetooth also come with a second limitation: They need your phone to act as the source of an Apple Music session. If you walk too far from your Bluetooth speaker (or leave the reach of your Wi-Fi network with AirPlay), the music stops.

A native integration has the potential to address both problems, which is why Sonos has historically been one of the only ways2 to listen to Apple Music in hi-res and Dolby Atmos.

The direct-stream advantage

The reason a native integration like Sonos’ gets around these two restrictions is that it lets wireless speakers and streamers access Apple Music content directly from Apple’s servers, without any intermediaries.

When you play a track from Apple Music on Sonos, it doesn’t involve your phone or laptop at all. One of your Sonos products streams the music from Apple Music and then redistributes it to your other Sonos products.

Bluetooth and AirPlay work differently. When you play Apple Music using these wireless connections, your phone plays music from the Apple Music app. Bluetooth and AirPlay pass that music along to your connected speaker.

The catch is that before Bluetooth and AirPlay can do their wireless magic, they repackage your audio, making the stream much smaller in terms of bandwidth. The unfortunate cost of this repackaging — known as lossy compression — is lower audio quality and no support for spatial audio like Dolby Atmos.

Native integrations offer other benefits, too. With Sonos, Wiim, and Denon’s HEOS, natively integrated music services can be added to their universal search feature.

Is Bluesound better than Sonos?

One of the biggest reasons Bluesound has developed a loyal following of audio enthusiasts, despite Sonos’ commanding lead in the wireless multiroom space, is its support of the very highest digital audio specifications.

For instance, Sonos’ support for hi-res audio tops out at 24-bit/48kHz. When retrieving stream information from music services, Sonos will grab the 24/48 version if available. If a service offers only higher-resolution versions, e.g., 24/96 or 24/192, Sonos will fall back to the best version it can find (often CD-quality, at 16-bit/44.1kHz).

Bluesound, by comparison, can natively handle up to 24-bit/192kHz, so in theory, it can play any version it has access to.

Can you hear the difference between 48kHz and 192kHz? Many would argue you can’t, but that’s almost beside the point. Since Apple Music streams its lossless catalog at up to 24-bit/192kHz, the argument has always been that Sonos prevents you from hearing Apple Music at its highest level of quality.

With its new native Apple Music integration, Bluesound should be the first wireless audio system that lets you play any stream at its maximum setting. It’s crushing to learn that, for now at least, it won’t even get the basic lossless level of CD quality.

Where is Apple Music’s version of Spotify Connect?

Native integrations are ideal for folks who like to manage and stream their music from dedicated system apps like Sonos, BluOS, or Wiim Home. However, in between the all-in approach of a native integration, and the easy but lossy approach of Bluetooth/AirPlay, there is a third approach that tries to combine the best of both worlds.

It’s informally known as the “Connect” solution since it was popularized by Spotify under the Spotify Connect brand.

When a wireless speaker or audio system is Spotify Connect compatible, you can stream Spotify content to it from your Spotify smartphone app, without the limitations of Bluetooth, AirPlay, or even Google Cast.

Connect works similarly to a native integration in that the compatible speaker receives its audio stream directly from Spotify, so audio quality can potentially be at the highest level that both Spotify and the speaker can mutually support.

However, the entire user experience never leaves the Spotify app, which, needless to say, Spotify loves.

The Spotify Connect model is so successful that it has been copied by Tidal and Qobuz, both of which have their own Connect programs. It’s worth noting that on some devices, Tidal Connect lets you stream Dolby Atmos Music.

Apple has never been shy about encouraging manufacturers to adopt its Made for iPhone (MFi) program, which now encompasses a wide variety of labels like Made for iPhone, Made for iPad, Made for Apple Watch, etc.

So why not take the next logical step and create a direct-stream equivalent of Spotify Connect? Since Apple has already used “Apple Music Connect” — twice! — once for its now-defunct social media service and, more recently, for its new label partnership program, perhaps Apple could call this one Made for Apple Music.

Given Apple’s proven track record of wanting absolute control over its products, and the quality-and-format-limited native Apple Music integration Bluesound just rolled out, maybe a direct-stream option is exactly what Apple is planning.

For now, however, Bluesound-owning Apple Music subscribers who want a simple way to hear their music have a new option. It just might not be music to their ears.

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The fourth-gen Apple TV 4K is here. It packs a new, more powerful A19 processor, a suite of microphones for hands-free Siri AI, and a whopper of a price: $299 USD ($429 CAD).

For those who like to keep score, that’s twice the $149 USD the comparable third-gen model cost until June, when Apple raised it to $249 USD. Unlike the third generation, there’s only one version this time around (last time, you could spend $20 less if you were willing to settle for 64GB of storage instead of 128GB and give up the Ethernet port).

The price hike is shocking to see in real life, even though industry watchers have been warning of this for months, laying the blame mostly at the feet of AI companies and their insatiable appetite for chips (both processors and memory).

But the thing that rankles most — at least for those of us who care deeply about audio — is that despite the increased price and the presumably better performance of that A19 chip, the latest Apple TV 4K still doesn’t support audio passthrough.

The passthrough problem

Passthrough simply means that a device like the Apple TV 4K should preserve the audio (and video) quality of the source file you’re playing and hand it off, intact, to your downstream gear, like your TV, AV receiver, or soundbar. The device “passes it through” without alteration.

But that’s not what an Apple TV 4K does, or at least, not consistently. There are some formats, like Dolby Digital Plus, that it supports natively, with or without Dolby Atmos. That’s why Netflix, Disney+, and other Atmos streaming services work on Apple TV (they all use the Dolby Digital Plus version of Atmos).

However, the Apple TV 4K doesn’t support Dolby TrueHD (the hi-res, lossless format used on Blu-ray discs) at all. If an app like Plex tried to send it to the Apple TV’s playback system, it would fail and you’d get no audio.

As a workaround, Plex (or any other third-party video app) has to decode Dolby TrueHD before sending it to the Apple TV’s playback system. This generally works well … unless Dolby Atmos is involved: Apple doesn’t provide a pathway for both decoded TrueHD and Dolby Atmos information to be output together as a single package — something a TV, AV receiver, or soundbar requires.

The highly frustrating result: An Apple TV 4K lets you hear lossless audio or lossy Dolby Atmos, but not lossless Dolby Atmos.

Wow, that was nerdy. Seriously, who cares?

I admit, the anger over the ongoing lack of passthrough on an Apple TV 4K can feel like we’re making a mountain out of a molehill. And yet, I think most people can agree — at least in principle — that you should be able to play your media, regardless of its provenance, at the highest possible quality.

For a lot of folks, this means forgoing the otherwise excellent Apple TV experience for another streaming device. At the moment, it’s a choice between Nvidia’s now-discontinued 2019 Shield TV, the 2019 Shield TV Pro, or the 2022 Amazon Fire TV Cube 3rd Gen. Even though they’re far older than the Apple TV 4K, all three of these devices can do audio passthrough.

The Shield TV Pro will even passthrough Dolby’s biggest lossless and spatial rival, DTS-HD and DTS:X.

Will Apple ever support passthrough?

Apple hasn’t said anything about future support for audio passthrough, but that hasn’t stopped some industry watchers from speculating on the possibility. Caleb Denison, my former Digital Trends colleague and A/V expert extraordinaire, thinks Apple may issue a software update that brings passthrough to the latest Apple TV 4K.

I hope he’s right. Not only would it finally answer the calls from enthusiasts, but it would also provide Apple with a much-needed tool for its future music strategy.

TrueHD and Atmos Music: The Holy Grail

Apple has long been bullish on lossless, hi-res audio and spatial audio (typically in the form of Dolby Atmos). But as I pointed out above, getting them to coexist as a single experience hasn’t been high on the company’s list of priorities. That’s a huge missed opportunity for Apple Music.

Apple Music has offered tracks in Dolby Atmos Music for several years, but most subscribers don’t realize that it gets delivered as Dolby Digital Plus — in other words, it’s lossy. If you’ve ever listened to Dolby Atmos Music on your home theater system and found it less than dazzling in terms of sound quality, this is almost certainly why.

A typical Dolby Atmos Music song encoded in Dolby Digital Plus is streamed at 768kbps. The TrueHD version of the same track will use anywhere from 3-7Mbps, making the lossy version roughly a quarter to a tenth of the size of a TrueHD equivalent. That’s a ton of lost information.

If Apple ever adds lossless Dolby Atmos Music to Apple Music — and I sincerely hope it does — the Apple TV 4K, with its connection to people’s home theaters, is perfectly situated to take advantage of it. In fact …

Quad-speaker HomePod home theater

If the lack of passthrough is the biggest (audio) reason to skip the new Apple TV 4K, its ability to wirelessly drive a set of four Apple HomePod speakers might be the biggest reason to consider buying it.

Along with the new Apple TV 4K, Apple debuted the second-gen HomePod mini ($149) and announced that you’ll be able to use four of them simultaneously (two in front, two in back) for wireless home theater. Moreover, if you already own a pair of the larger, second-gen HomePods, you can keep them in front and add a pair of HomePod mini 2s as surrounds.

I don’t know if this combo will pose serious competition to a company like Sonos, but it marks the first time you’ll be able to create an all-Apple, four-speaker Dolby Atmos sound system. And what better way to demonstrate its capabilities than to feed it TrueHD-based Dolby Atmos and Atmos Music?

Grab ‘em while you can

There are a few more reasons to consider buying the new Apple TV 4K, including its Siri-activated remote finder (something I’ve never needed, but apparently I’m in the minority), and its ability to act as a hub for Apple’s new Home Collection of smart home devices.

But frankly, I think most folks will be better off with the previous generation, especially if you can find it for its $249 price or lower.

And for those who want passthrough? Nvidia tells me that the Shield TV Pro is only temporarily out of stock, and will return at its $299 price soon. It may lack the Apple TV 4K’s superb ad-free interface, and snappy, no-lag performance, but it remains the one streaming device that can deliver every audio and video format to your devices, untouched and unaltered.

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When Sonos CEO Tom Conrad introduced the new Sonos Ace Ultra, he began his keynote by acknowledging how weird it is that the Sonos Ace — the company’s first wireless headphones — can’t be controlled by the Sonos app. The launch event was even titled, “We Had One Job,” a knowing wink at the criticism the Sonos Ace received. Conrad gets a certain amount of latitude to shine a light on this misstep, because he wasn’t in charge of the company at the time.

Sonos Ace Ultra
Product Score: 4.5/5

Pros:

• Can be controlled via the Sonos app

• Great sound and an improved transparency mode

• Top-notch noise cancellation and comfort

Cons:

• Can’t do lossless or spatial audio over Wi-Fi

• Needs at least one compatible Sonos speaker for Wi-Fi streaming

• Won’t work with Sonos’ upcoming AI voice assistant

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Conrad’s also entitled to take a victory lap of sorts: The new Ace Ultra do indeed fix the Ace’s glaring omission, but with some caveats.

The fix is something known as Headphone Linking, which Sonos notes is an “Early Access” feature:

It’s opt-in, provided as-is, and subject to change and limitation during ongoing development. Requires a compatible Sonos speaker, WiFi, and setup through the Sonos app.

Take careful note of the “requires a compatible Sonos speaker” part, because if you’re a long-time Sonos customer with a house full of pre-2018 speakers, Headphone Linking may not work. You need at least one compatible product, and the venerable Play:1, Play:3, and hugely popular Sonos One, for instance, are not on the list. Neither are any of the now-discontinued Ikea-branded, Sonos-controlled Symfonisk speakers.

Finally part of the family

Still, if you have a compatible speaker (and it isn’t being used as a home theater surround), the Sonos app can see and control the Ace Ultra. The headphones show up in the System tab, along with your other Sonos products. You can even pin them to the top of the list for easy access.

When you use the app’s universal search — easily one of its best features — you can stream the result directly to the Ace Ultra. It’s awesome to finally have this option. You can also walk right up to your Linking-compatible speakers and transfer music to and from the headphones with a long-press on the Ace Ultra’s multifunction button. It works seamlessly.

Room for improvement

However, Conrad’s “one job” isn’t finished. As thrilled as I am to see the Ace Ultra show up in the app, some frustrating limitations remain.

The big one for me right now is the lack of lossless and spatial audio. I had been hoping that since Sonos lets the Ace Ultra join people’s existing Sonos systems, the headphones would get the same level of audio stream as the company’s speakers do, namely, lossless CD-quality at up to 24-bit/48kHz. At the launch event, I was told that, for now, the headphones are restricted to lossy audio.

In other words, when connected to your home system, your state-of-the-art, $449 Sonos wireless headphones are getting the same kind of lossy stream as a $30 set of budget Bluetooth earbuds. Sonos told me the stream is the equivalent of SBC, the baseline Bluetooth codec. At the moment, the only way to move up to CD-quality lossless is to connect them via USB-C, or pair them with your phone (if it happens to be one of the few that supports aptX Lossless).

For Dolby Atmos Music, a similar limitation exists. Unless you use the Ace Ultra’s TV Audio Swap feature with one of Sonos’ Dolby Atmos-capable soundbars, there’s no option to stream this spatial audio format to the headphones from the Sonos app. Oddly, they work with Atmos tracks over Bluetooth. Despite my repeated questions, no technical reasons were given for these limitations.

If you’ve grown accustomed to using AirPlay with your Sonos speakers — something I suspect a lot of people started doing after the company launched its disastrous app redesign in May 2024 — that won’t work with the Ace Ultra. The new headphones aren’t AirPlay compatible, and if you start an AirPlay session on one of your Sonos speakers, you won’t be able to transfer it to the Ace Ultra, even if the speaker is compatible with Headphone Linking. The same thing goes for Bluetooth sessions.

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Lesser annoyances exist, too. Despite having built-in mics that let you talk to your phone’s voice assistant, the Ace Ultra won’t let you talk to any of the voice assistants your existing Sonos speakers may support, like Alexa, Google Assistant, or even Sonos’ homegrown Sonos Voice Control (the one with a deliciously smooth reproduction of Giancarlo Esposito’s voice).

I was also told that there’s no timeline for compatibility with the company’s soon-to-launch next-gen AI voice assistant, known as Sonos 27voice.

Managing power (and expectations)

I think the look on my face must have said it all, because the team members on hand offered me a partial explanation for my unfulfilled expectations: power management.

A typical Sonos speaker, like the Era 100, has its own CPU and a dedicated Wi-Fi connection. These are the two ingredients that let it retrieve and play music from the internet independently of any other Sonos speaker in your home. Trouble is, these two ingredients are very power-hungry. The Ace Ultra have their own chips, but I get the distinct impression they were chosen for their power efficiency, not their processing skills. The headphones also have Wi-Fi, but the Sonos system guards it jealously to conserve battery power.

The headphones can’t connect to Wi-Fi music streams on their own. When you start a streaming session on the headphones, the music is actually being relayed to them from one of the Headphone Linking-compatible speakers in your home. The playback buttons on the headphones act as a remote control, telling the linked Sonos product when to start, stop, or skip tracks. If you were wondering why Sonos makes a compatible speaker a prerequisite for Headphone Linking, this is the reason.

Sonos says the Ace Ultra’s ecosystem compatibility isn’t the only reason to buy them. It claims improvements have been made to sound quality, noise cancellation, transparency, and call quality, when compared to the Ace — which, by the way, Sonos now sells for $349.

The Ace Ultra also have a replaceable battery, something we’re beginning to see on a lot of new wireless headphones, likely in response to EU regulations that come into effect in 2027. Unfortunately, due to the design, you’ll need to buy a special kit to do the swap yourself.

Modest improvements

I’ve been testing out the Ace Ultra for a few weeks now, and some of those claims ring true. Others, not as much.

Transparency is the big winner. It’s noticeably clearer than the Ace’s and puts the Ace Ultra in close contention with Apple’s AirPods Max 2 — still the reigning champs. When I used transparency mode during calls or even just for casual in-person conversations with family members, my voice sounded much more natural to me.

Active noise cancellation (ANC) is a trickier area. Sonos says it has doubled the performance compared to the Ace, but only around the 30Hz region of the spectrum. The Ace were already one of the best ANC headphones for this very low frequency range, so Sonos is just improving on an already impressive record. However, 30Hz is so low that it takes a lot of power to turn it into audible sound (humans are much more sensitive to higher frequencies). So there aren’t that many day-to-day situations where you’d notice the Ace Ultra’s enhancement.

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I tried using a subwoofer as a stand-in for low-frequency noise, but it could only generate loud sounds in the 70-85Hz range. Unsurprisingly, swapping back and forth between the Ace and Ace Ultra didn’t reveal a clear winner — they both did a very good job of minimizing the noise. Curiously though, the Ace Ultra seems to be a little worse at canceling mid frequencies.

I often use my nearby bathroom exhaust fan as a test of annoying real-world sounds. From about five feet away, the Ace almost entirely killed the fan noise (with an average frequency of 300Hz), while the Ace Ultra still let a little of that noise get in.

Call quality has improved, but it’s a mild change at best. The Ace have always been good at dampening external sounds when you’re on the phone (though not as good as the superb JBL Tour One M3), but they often struggle to keep your voice clear too. On my test recordings, the louder the background sounds got, the more my voice became distorted, or in some cases completely inaudible. The Ace Ultra kept my voice a bit clearer in both loud and quiet situations, but not enough that I’d say you should rush out and buy them if you have the Ace.

With sound quality, we’re again dealing with small differences. Tonally speaking, the Ace and Ace Ultra are voiced identically. Meaning, out of the box, with no EQ adjustments, the emphasis and balance of frequencies are the same. The Ace Ultra give off slightly more warmth, and the highs feel a touch less strident, but it’s very close.

However, the Ace Ultra give you more control over the factory tuning. Instead of the usual two bass/treble sliders Sonos provides for most of its speakers (and the Ace), the Ace Ultra gets three (bass/mids/treble), plus an optional 8-band equalizer for more granular tweaks.

If you listen really carefully, you may notice that the Ace Ultra sound a little smoother than the Ace. The opening of Bob Dylan’s Man in the Long Black Coat has a lot going on: high-pitched chirping, midrange guitar twangs, and deep bass notes. I found that the Ace Ultra does a better job of making these elements feel cohesive and relaxed. The Ace renders them with a slightly sharper edge.

So what’s the bottom line for the Sonos Ace Ultra?

The Sonos Ace Ultra are a great set of wireless headphones — for a very specific group of people.

Their lack of independent Wi-Fi and streaming access means they can’t be used as an introduction to the world of Sonos wireless audio. So folks who haven’t yet taken the plunge into Sonos’ ecosystem have little reason to buy the Ace Ultra.

And if you’re already part of the Sonos experience, but you don’t own at least one of the Headphone Linking-compatible speakers, you should also hesitate — you won’t be able to control the Ace Ultra alongside your existing Sonos products.

If you belong to either group, it’s a perfect time to consider the original Sonos Ace. With their new lower price, they’re now a very compelling alternative to flagship models from Sony, Apple, Beats, Bose, and Sennheiser.

However, if you’re a Sonos customer with one or more compatible speakers, and you’re in the market for a set of top-notch wireless headphones, the Ace Ultra should be high on your list. Being able to manage them together with your other Sonos gear is a unique feature. And, like their predecessor, they check a ton of other critical boxes: Design, comfort, sound quality, noise cancellation, and battery life. These are so strong that you won’t be missing out on any of them when compared to the competition (Apple AirPods Max 2, Bose QuietComfort Ultra Gen 2, Sennheiser Momentum 5 Wireless, or Sony WH-1000XM6).

The one area where the Ace Ultra noticeably lag is call quality, but even then, it’s fine for all but the noisiest situations.

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Transparency promotes trust. Please check out my disclosures page, which describes how I work with manufacturers to acquire product samples, and how I guard my editorial independence.

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I took a much-deserved shot at Apple when it became clear that it wasn’t going to announce a set of open-ear earbuds to go with its fancy new AI-enhanced version of Siri.

Instead, it gave us the AirPods 5. They’re an improvement over the AirPods 4 with ANC, but despite Apple’s insistence on referring to them as “open” earbuds, they aren’t. They’re semi-open, and that makes a big difference when you’re trying to hear the world around you.

So I was thrilled to see that Bose is not only doubling down on its open-ear lineup with two new models, but the company also tells me these will be the first open-ear earbuds to get Alexa+ built-in.

Alexa+ is the newer, conversational version of Amazon’s voice assistant, and it makes chatting with Alexa a way better experience.

I’ve been using it for about 8 months on an Echo Dot smart speaker and an Echo Show 11, and it’s proven very helpful for everything from recipes to general info on almost any topic you can think of. To me, the combo of an open-ear design and an AI that never says, “I’m sorry, I don’t understand,” is a perfect match.

The new models are the Bose Sport Open Earbuds ($199 USD), and a second-gen version of the Bose Ultra Open Earbuds ($299). Each can be preordered on September 19, and will be generally available starting October 1. Shortly after this date, Bose says both models will receive a firmware update that enables Alexa+, Google Find Hub, and shortcut support for Apple Music.

Another thing that makes me happy: Bose tells me Bluetooth Auracast is going to be added at some point after launch.

Both will be available in Black or White Smoke. The Sport Open Earbuds also get a limited-edition Eucalyptus Green, while the next-gen Ultra Open Earbuds get Cherry Chocolate, Olive Green, and Sky Pink as their limited-edition colors.

A new Sport

If “Bose Sport Open Earbuds” sounds vaguely familiar, it might be because this was the name of the product that effectively launched the open-ear category when it debuted in 2021. The earhook design set the standard for open-ears, but the sound quality was only so-so, the charging case was bulky, and the case didn’t have its own internal battery. Bose ended up discontinuing it less than a year later and didn’t re-enter the open-ear category until 2024 with the first-gen Ultra Open model.

Other than the name and the price, the new Bose Sport Open Earbuds (2026) have almost nothing in common with their predecessor.

They use a C-shape clip design that has become increasingly popular among open-ear users thanks to its comfort and better compatibility with eyeglasses. Where things get interesting is Bose’s claim that these buds are built for “the realities of active, strenuous movement,” which is not something I normally associate with clip-style open-ears.

The company says a soft silicone matte finish gives them enough stability that they won’t come loose during running, fitness, or even cartwheels.

They’re equipped with physical buttons — which I much prefer to touch controls — and the buds are rated IP54 for sweat, splash, and dust resistance.

Astonishingly, the charging case supports wireless charging (a feature Bose hasn’t always offered, even on its flagship earbuds) and the company says you can expect the earbuds to last up to 7 hours per charge. The case stores up to 3 full recharges (22 hours).

The returning champ

The second-gen Bose Ultra Open Earbuds keep their cuff-like shape, but their charging case has been redesigned to stand up, and it’s also wireless-capable (the first-gen was wired-only). The buds get more battery life per charge (9 hours vs. 7) but about the same total time when you include the case (28.5 hours vs. 27).

Bose’s excellent Immersive Audio mode with head-tracking is joined by a new Cinema mode, which the company says creates a wider, more immersive soundstage while keeping dialogue sharp, clear, and precisely centered. The result, apparently, is a “theater-like listening experience that works with any content source.”

The second-gen continues to support Snapdragon Sound with aptX codecs, for compatible phones or adapters.

Unfortunately, Bose has decided to drop support for its Bose Personal Surround on the second-gen Bose Ultra Open Earbuds. This feature let the first-gen earbuds act as a set of home theater surround speakers when connected to a compatible soundbar, like the Bose Smart Ultra Soundbar.

Both models benefit from Auto Volume, which adjusts based on how noisy your environment is, and both get Bose SpeechClarity, a proprietary AI-enhanced voice-isolation technology that uses two mics for calls.

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As a music streaming service, Qobuz isn’t exactly a household brand like Spotify or Apple Music. Its loyal, 1.2 million-strong user base — earned largely thanks to the platform’s commitment to hi-res audio, and an almost entirely human-curated catalog — is tiny when compared to the major services.

But in 2025, it was ranked as the second-fastest growing entertainment and media app in the U.S., with a more than 200% increase in year-over-year growth.

So when Qobuz Managing Director Dan Mackta said in a recent interview, “I do not call it AI music, because I don’t think it’s music,” that got my attention.

Given that I had just covered Tidal’s decision to keep AI music in its streaming catalog — yet prevent those tracks’ creators from earning money — now seemed like the perfect time to find out more about where Qobuz (and Mackta) stand on the whole issue of AI music. Not just how he defines it, but how he thinks it should be handled, and what it means for listeners, artists, record labels, and streaming services.

I invited Mackta to speak with me, and our conversation covered all that and more.

So what does he call AI music? Lots of not-very-complimentary things: slop, shlock, crap, garbage, pabulum, a gimmick, and most commonly, “a bummer.”

I tried to get Mackta to define his threshold for AI vs. non-AI music, but this isn’t his first rodeo and he deftly avoided providing a concrete answer.

Still, he did come out in favor of AI as a tool for musicians — as long as they don’t “substantively replace human ingenuity and creativity.”

Here’s the full interview. I hope you enjoy it. If you have questions about AI music specifically, or streaming music in general, let me know in the comments and I’ll try to address them in future articles.

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In 2024, Samsung launched the Galaxy Buds 3 Pro, a set of noise-canceling wireless earbuds that drew immediate comparisons to Apple’s AirPods Pro, mostly because the two products looked so similar, right down to the charging case shape and the squeeze-to-click sensors on the stems.

But they also included a feature no Apple earbuds had ever possessed: “blade lights” — razor-thin, white LEDs that took up the top half of the stems.

There’s a lot you can do with earbud LEDs. They can indicate when you’re on a call — Jabra’s Evolve3 85 headphones do this — or conversely, indicate when you’re in transparency mode and able to hear and talk with people.

Critically, they can be used to indicate when earbuds are being used to record audio.

Samsung’s blade lights weren’t used to indicate any of these modes, despite requests from users to do so. Then, with the 2026 introduction of the Galaxy Buds 4 Pro, suddenly the LEDs were gone, and no was explanation given.

That decision may come back to haunt Samsung, much like the lack of indicator LEDs on virtually all other wireless earbuds is about to be a serious problem for the industry. To understand why, we need only look at Meta.

Consent has become a casualty

Meta (the company that owns Facebook, Instagram, and plenty of other social media services) has been in hot water lately over how its popular Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses have been used to record people without their knowledge or consent.

The issue is how easy it has been for owners of these glasses to defeat the little LED indicator that’s supposed to turn on when recording begins. Without that telltale — the visual equivalent of the shutter sound on a smartphone camera — there’s no way to know you’re being filmed.

I highly recommend Becky Scarrott’s in-depth report if you want to learn more.

Real harm has been caused, according to reports from the BBC. So why don’t wireless earbuds have any indicators at all?

On the record

It’s true that, at the moment, few earbuds on the market are designed to capture and record ambient audio — the built-in mics are mostly used for calls. But the future will look different from the present.

Viaim’s RecDot earbuds are a perfect example. They can capture calls, perform real-time translation, and record in-person meetings. If you use the included charging case to initiate these recordings, a participant might notice the recording indicator on the case. But if you don’t have the case with you, you can use the RecDot’s squeeze-to-record gesture on the earbuds — there’s no visible indicator that recording is in progress.

I thought that was bad until I realized how easy it is to record a conversation using any earbuds. Using a set of AirPods Pro 3, I hit record inside iOS’s Voice Memos app and strolled into the kitchen to have a conversation with my wife. From four feet away, her voice was almost as clear as mine. If I hadn’t prepped her beforehand, she would never have known.

Better to ask permission

The inconvenient (but far more ethical) truth is that recording indicators should be a mechanism of confirmation, not authorization.

Expecting someone to see an LED, whether on a set of earbuds or glasses, and then awkwardly say, “please stop recording me,” is not very civil. And in some cases, not at all legal.

I live in Toronto, Canada, a place with very lax recording laws. Not only am I free to record in any public space without gathering consent from those around me, but I’m even allowed to record someone I’m talking to in-person or on the phone without their consent. It’s a one-party consent jurisdiction, and the only rule is that I must be one of the participants in the interaction. I can’t record two other people without getting at least one person’s consent.

Things are very different in a state like Florida, which is a two-party (sometimes called all-party) consent jurisdiction. You can still record in public, where there's no expectation of privacy, but in a small group or one-on-one, recording without consent is against the law and can carry severe penalties, and no, a tiny recording indicator LED isn’t likely to be seen as a substitute for that consent.

Indicating action

Getting consent is the right thing to do. But even if consent is given, a visual reminder of an ongoing recording is a good idea. It’s a standard feature in communication apps like Zoom, Teams, and Webex, so why shouldn’t it exist in the real world, too?

Which brings us back to Samsung’s abandoned blade lights.

I don’t know why the company ditched them. Maybe it’s because their sheer lack of utility meant that few people used them. An informal Reddit poll of Buds 3 Pro owners found nearly three-quarters said they rarely or never used the blade light.

But it certainly gave up a potentially powerful privacy tool right at the moment when we need it most.

If the Ray-Ban Meta fiasco has taught us anything, erring on the side of more recording awareness is never a bad thing.

It’s a lesson for an entire industry.

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The countdown is on. Sonos CEO Tom Conrad has already hinted at a big reveal come September, and now there’s an official FCC document that confirms the existence of a product known as the Sonos Ace Ultra.

That’s cause for excitement and, maybe, just a little trepidation.

The Sonos Ace — which launched in 2024 — got a really positive reception, with reviewers like myself praising Sonos’ first headphones for their style, comfort, noise-canceling, and interface. From a hardware point of view, the Ace were a triumph.

Where things fell genuinely short of expectations was the level of integration into the overall Sonos ecosystem. With the exception of a clever toggle that lets owners of Sonos’ Dolby Atmos soundbars flip their TV sound from the speaker to the Ace and back again, the sleek wireless cans might as well have had another company’s brand etched onto the earcups.

The Ace don’t appear in the Sonos app under the System tab, where your other Sonos speakers and components are listed, and so they’re effectively cut off from every software feature that makes a Sonos product, well, a Sonos product.

As Chris Welch noted in his report for Bloomberg, this is greatly ironic given that the Sonos Ace are widely suspected to be the root cause of Sonos’ tragically flawed app redesign that rolled out less than two weeks before the Ace’s debut.

Then-CEO Patrick Spence misjudged how badly the combo would dampen overall enthusiasm for the Ace. I doubt that Conrad will make the same mistake.

So what does the Sonos Ace Ultra need to do to avoid its predecessor’s fate?

Full app integration

If it’s got a Sonos logo on it, it should be controlled by the Sonos app. Full stop. I say that knowing that this is actually much harder than it sounds.

The reality is that every Sonos product that shows up in the Sonos app is currently Wi-Fi enabled. That goes for the company’s dual-use portable speakers too (the Move 2, Roam 2, and Play). When at home, they operate on Wi-Fi and only need to be switched to Bluetooth mode when you step out the door (or out of Wi-Fi range).

Technically speaking, the current Ace model already uses Wi-Fi — it’s just been knee-capped: it serves the soundbar swap function I mentioned earlier, and that’s it.

Related:

I’ve tested a set of Wi-Fi headphones called the Hed Unity, and they worked surprisingly well. I recently learned that HiFiMAN sells two such models: Arya WiFi and HE1000 WiFi. Unfortunately, all three models pay the unavoidable price for Wi-Fi — heavily degraded battery life. When I tested the Hed Unity, I was lucky to get eight hours when using Wi-Fi, and the HE1000 reportedly lasts only five.

This, more than anything else, is likely why Sonos didn’t go full Wi-Fi for the Ace. Still, it will need to overcome this limitation or hope that customers accept it as the tradeoff for a truly integrated set of Sonos cans.

One way Sonos might be able to manage it is if it integrates Qualcomm’s XPAN technology. Released in 2023, XPAN chips marry Bluetooth and Wi-Fi into a unified structure and can switch between them seamlessly as network conditions require, according to Qualcomm. The chips are also very energy efficient, which could alleviate the stamina problem.

Sonos is already partnered with Qualcomm on the first-gen Ace, which supports Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Sound platform, so it isn’t a stretch to think that the Ace Ultra might be used as XPAN’s first mass-market headphone product (XPAN has already been used on a very limited basis in wireless earbuds).

If Sonos gets this part right, I’ll consider the Ace Ultra a serious upgrade over the Ace. But curiously, Sonos may have more up its sleeve.

Hey, Sonos

Welch points out that Sonos appears ready to lean into AI. During the company’s July 2026 earnings call, Conrad hinted at it, saying Sonos’ work on products over the past year has been “about conversational computing and predictive intelligence moving into the home.”

That could entail a lot of possibilities, but given Sonos’ investments in its own AI voice tech (Sonos Voice Control) and its proven willingness to work with third-party voice assistants like Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant, I’m willing to bet voice interaction will feature strongly in the Ace Ultra’s debut. The Ace lets you interact with your phone’s built-in assistant, but it’s not hands-free, and you can’t access Sonos Voice Control or any other AI.

But here’s the catch: Adding Alexa Plus (which Bose recently did on its new Lifestyle Ultra Speaker) isn’t going to be enough. Alexa Plus is a big improvement over Alexa, and yet, for all of its conversational skills, it still struggles with music playback tasks — the heart of the Sonos experience.

For Sonos to make a real dent in this space, it needs to demonstrate a voice AI that can quickly and accurately do anything that you can do yourself, using the Sonos app. Sonos Voice Control was supposed to fill that role, but so far, it hasn’t met that bar. Although, I gotta say, Giancarlo Esposito’s synthesized voice remains my favorite of all the voice assistants. It’s soooo smooth and sonorous.

That’s my wishlist for the Sonos Ace Ultra: Full app integration and a voice assistant that is genuinely useful. With those two features (along with everything that made the first-gen Ace so good), I think Sonos fans will have a lot to look forward to.

See you in September!

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The vinyl resurgence shows no signs of slowing, and it’s been joined by a related trend: Renewed interest in vintage standalone digital players like the iconic iPod.

For purists seeking the most authentic experience, the paths are clear.

Records must be played on turntables connected to amplifiers. And listening to them can only be done via wired speakers or headphones -- an unbroken, all-analog chain. Extra points for using a vintage amp and speakers!

The vintage MP3 route is even stricter. Only an original iPod will do, preferably paired with its matching white earbuds. Rip your CDs, transfer them to your iPod via iTunes (or Apple Music, if you must).

In both of these situations, nostalgia and vibes are the main drivers. Some will say that it’s about the sound, and hey, if you think they sound better, I’m not going to argue. I mean, I could, but I won’t. Regardless, these setups are not intended to marry the old with the new — in fact, it’s the exact opposite. It’s old for old’s sake.

But what if you’re not ready to invest money in a standalone, intentionally old-school rig, and yet you still want to participate in the vinyl and MP3 player trend?

This week, two companies — coincidentally pitched by the same PR team — caught my attention for the way their products thread that exact needle: Victrola and Fiio.

Note: I haven’t tried either of these products, so don’t take any of this as a recommendation.

The turntable with a built-in radio station

Victrola announced that its Wave turntable is finally available to buy for $499 USD. Admittedly, that’s not a super affordable price for a turntable, but the Wave has a feature that lets you bypass both an amp and wired speakers, if you want. The Wave integrates Bluetooth Auracast — it’s the first turntable to do so.

Regular Bluetooth turntables are nothing new, but with Auracast, the Wave essentially becomes its own radio station, able to broadcast the vinyl playback to an unlimited number of Auracast-capable speakers, headphones, earbuds, and even hearing aids, simultaneously.

Auracast is built on Bluetooth as a wireless technology, but it skips the whole device pairing process. If you have a set of Auracast-capable headphones, like the JBL Tour One M3, accessing an Auracast broadcast is as easy as connecting to a Wi-Fi access point. I’m a big fan of Auracast technology and it’s great to see it finding a home in more products.

I’m definitely not what you’d call a vinyl guy — I don’t even own a turntable — but my understanding is that the Wave manages to side-step some of the criticisms of previous Victrola models.

It has an adjustable counterweight, a removable headshell that makes swapping cartridges easier, and its dust cover can actually be used during playback (as opposed to the made-for-Sonos Victrola Stream Onyx, which has an odd, storage-only cover). And if you’re fussy about pre-amps, you can disable the one that’s built into the Wave and use your own. In other words, you aren’t giving up the things that make the vinyl experience worthwhile to get the latest in wireless convenience.

Check price on Amazon

The 2000s Digital Walkman, reborn

For its part, Fiio officially launched the Snowsky Echo Nano, a sleek and slender aluminum-cased little MP3 player that costs just $50 USD. The Echo Nano deliberately mimics the size and shape of Sony’s popular mid-2000s “lipstick” Digital Walkman, which came in multiple colors and offered a cable-free way to transfer your tunes thanks to the built-in USB connection on the end.

As with those Sony players or vintage iPods, the Echo Nano’s lure is distraction-free (and subscription-free) listening. And, for better or worse, there’s no Wi-Fi or even Bluetooth. You provide your own wired earbuds or headphones. The tiny OLED display looks about as awkward to read as Sony’s, though the large navigation wheel may make it easier to navigate than Sony’s integrated buttons.

Still, Fiio has thrown in a few extras that make the Echo Nano more than just a nostalgia player. It can handle lossless and hi-res files, including the slightly exotic DSD256 format — Sony’s original was limited to MP3 and WMA — and it has expandable storage up to 256GB via SD cards, whereas Sony’s was stuck at a permanent 4GB. But perhaps more importantly for people who want to use wired headphones or earbuds with their smartphones (which almost never have headphone jacks), you can plug the Echo Nano into any USB-C phone, tablet, or laptop and it will act as a digital-to-analog converter (DAC).

To be fair, the Echo Nano isn’t the first modern MP3 player with these features. In fact, they’re standard fare, with many models going much further.

But the Echo Nano is the first of these I’ve seen to lean into the MP3 player design language that Sony pioneered more than 20 years ago, which I’m guessing still resonates with the people who grew up listening to these devices.

Oddly, it’s not a slam-dunk in favor of the Echo Nano. As old as the Sony Walkman is, it trumps the Echo Nano in two key areas: It has a built-in FM radio, and its battery life of up to 20 hours is way more than the Echo Nano’s paltry 7 hours.

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Last month, entertainment insights firm, Luminate, published its 2026 midyear trends report and one stat got a lot of attention: Sales of CDs in the U.S. are going up, not down, and it’s happening while vinyl sales continue to grow.

We’re not just talking about a small, statistically irrelevant increase. CD sales increased 16% to 16.3 million units during the first half of 2026.

When I saw this, my immediate reaction was to pat myself on the back. See, I’ve been cultivating a theory I call Music Sovereignty, and it rests on the notion that, after a decade of living with monthly music subscriptions, people now want more ownership and more control over their music. A big bump in CD sales — especially one that doesn’t cannibalize vinyl purchases — is exactly the kind of signal that would validate my theory.

And then I learned about K-pop.

K-pop loves the CD

That spike in sales, as it turns out, wasn’t caused by a sudden desire to stick it to the streaming services by leaning into physical media. When you look at the numbers at a more granular level, 58% of that growth was driven by one genre: K-pop. And within that genre, one album dominated: BTS’ ARIRANG. Of the 7 K-pop albums in Luminate’s top-10 list of CDs, ARIRANG was responsible for 32% of the total.

I knew that K-pop fans love BTS; I didn’t realize they were such dedicated CD listeners. But hey, a stat that helps is a stat that helps, so once again, I took this as a signal that K-pop fans were simply ahead of the curve when it comes to Music Sovereignty.

Except that they aren’t. Or at least, not in the way I was expecting.

Even in South Korea, the home of the K-pop phenomenon, only 8% use physical albums to listen to music, according to the Korea Creative Content Agency’s 2024 white paper on the music industry.

In the U.S., Luminate’s report claims that half of Gen Z and Millennial CD buyers don’t even own a CD player. So if they aren’t listening to CDs, why are they buying them?

Parasocial relationships

Being profoundly ignorant about K-pop, I turned to my former colleague, Andy Boxall, for answers. Andy and I both contributed to Digital Trends from 2018-2025. Over the course of many weekly editorial meetings, I discovered that in addition to being a top-notch tech writer, Andy is a huge J- and K-pop fan (J-pop being the Japanese-specific genre of pop).

Andy was more than happy to fill in the cavernous gaps in my K-pop knowledge.

“K-pop (and j-pop) are built on parasocial relationships,” he began — a concept that, as I discovered, is key to understanding a lot more about K-pop than just CD sales. “Buying a lightstick, attending a concert, taking part in a streaming push on YouTube, subscribing to the private messaging apps, and watching your favourite member’s livestreams,” are all ways that fans show their idols that they appreciate them. “Buying the CD is just one part of the fandom.”

For K-pop lovers, the CD is less about the musical ones and zeros embedded on a plastic disc, and often more about what comes packaged with the CD.

“Most k-pop releases are presented really well,” Andy explains. “They can come with photobooks, stickers, access to digital content, posters, and exclusive photocards. They’re genuinely cool for fans to buy.”

A culture of collecting and voting

The packaged content can become a strong motivation to buy the same CD multiple times, somewhat akin to buying packs of baseball or hockey cards in the hopes of scoring a rare item among the many duplicates. “It’s not uncommon for some fans to buy say 10 [of the same] CDs,” according to Reuters’ Minwoo Park and Daewoung Kim.

The other reason for buying CDs again and again reflects the parasocial relationships Andy describes. Some purchases enter the buyer into a lottery, with a chance to win a meet-and-greet with their favorite K-pop idol.

However, sales also determine whether artists get on music charts and increase their chances of winning prizes at awards shows, according to Areum Jeong, an assistant professor of Korean culture at Arizona State University.

This concept of CD-buying as a support mechanism is older than the current K-pop craze. It finds its roots in Japan’s music scene, where fans could influence the roles and opportunities of individual members of J-pop groups.

From 2009 to 2018, the all-female group AKB48 held so-called general elections, known as senbatsu sousenkyo. The stakes for the performers and the fans were high: The winner got to headline the group’s next single — a massive boost in profile, exposure, and marketability.

To vote in these elections, fans typically needed to buy an AKB48 single on CD, which contained a unique web code. That mechanism, as you’d expect, drove a lot of CD sales that had nothing to do with owning the music itself. In an unconfirmed report, one fan apparently spent US$6,700 to secure 2,700 votes during the 2012 election.

We’re still streaming … for now

So should we chalk up 2026’s surge in CD sales to little more than K-pop-induced collection behavior? And should I reconsider my Music Sovereignty theory?

Ian White, editor-in-chief of eCoustics.com puts some much-needed context around the numbers. “Nobody should mistake this for a revolt against streaming,” White points out, noting that while physical sales are doing well, streams are increasing too: The Luminate report shows that they rose by 4.8% to 732.7 billion in the U.S. during the same first half of 2026.

He also notes that although CDs are a far more affordable way than vinyl for people to physically collect music, the sales increase shouldn’t be seen as a buy-it-and-never-play-it phenomenon. As evidence, he points to the recent surge in the availability of new CD players, from ultra-affordable portable units like the $105 USD FIIO SNOWSKY Beatbox All-in-One CD Player, to the decidedly high-end, $1,399 USD NAD C 589 hi-fi component.

“Manufacturers do not make these products because three editors and someone’s uncle in Ohio refuse to discard their copies of Brothers in Arms,” he quips. “They see a market.”

That’s a solid argument that at least some of this demand is about playback, not just fandom support. It gets stronger still when you consider that even if you remove K-pop’s heavy influence, sales nonetheless saw a 6.7% growth.

Still small in the grander scheme, but it’s something I’ll be keeping an eye on as streaming music services continue to raise prices.

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There’s no such thing as the best-sounding wireless headphones. That’s like asking for the best-tasting burger or the most fashionable shoes. Instead, the goal is to find the cans that match your personal taste in tuning. In other words, the cans that are best for you.

For folks whose taste leans toward a balanced, neutral sound signature — one that doesn’t heavy-hand the lows or highs — the best wireless headphones have proven to be, year after year, Sennheiser’s Momentum series. The latest model, the Momentum 5 Wireless, keeps that sound intact.

But this generation’s biggest news isn’t sonic at all: it’s the first flagship wireless headphone I’ve tested with a battery you can swap yourself with a small screwdriver, no service center required. Sennheiser has also improved ANC, transparency, and call quality — the stuff that’s kept it a notch behind Sony, Bose, and Apple in years past.

The result is a great set of wireless cans and a no-brainer upgrade for Sennheiser fans.

Check price on Amazon

Sennheiser Momentum 5 Wireless
Product Score: 4/5

Pros:

• Excellent sound that doesn’t boost highs or lows

• User-replaceable battery with very high stamina

• Much improved ANC and transparency

Cons:

• Lackluster immersive audio feature

• Call quality isn’t as good as the competition

• No support for Auracast

Check price on Amazon

Easier on the wallet

Let’s start with the price, because I’m sure you’ve noticed that everything, particularly electronics, seems to be getting more expensive.

At $399.95 USD/$569 CAD, the fifth generation is $50 more than its predecessor, but still $50 less than Bose’s QuietComfort Ultra (2nd Gen) ($449 USD/$599 CAD), $60 less than Sony’s WH-1000XM6 ($459.99 USD/$599.99 CAD), and far more affordable than Apple’s AirPods Max 2 ($549 USD/$799 CAD).

I appreciate that Sennheiser has chosen to keep the Momentum 5 among the most affordable of the wireless headphone flagships.

Tried and true design

At first glance, it looks like Sennheiser has only made small cosmetic changes since the Momentum 4. A new circular logo treatment adorns the fabric-topped headband. There are two more microphones per side, which sit behind new metal grilles. The earcups are a tad deeper. They’re effectively the same weight (290 grams vs 293 for the fourth-gen).

Despite Bose returning to a fold-up hinge mechanism on the QuietComfort Ultra and Sony following suit with its XM6, Sennheiser has stuck with its fold-flat approach. To combat claims that this makes headphones harder to pack, the travel case has been aggressively trimmed down and is now smaller overall than Sony’s and just a little larger than Bose’s, yet it seems to offer just as much structure and protection.

The fifth-gen keeps the same touch controls for media, ANC, call, and volume (plus it adds a new gesture for spatial audio mode), with a single physical button for power and Bluetooth connections.

One of the biggest changes is on the inside: Remove the left ear cushion, grab a small Phillips screwdriver, and you’ll find that new user-replaceable battery. Just be careful — the driver assembly is connected via a ribbon cable and you definitely don’t want to damage it.

Sennheiser estimates the replacement battery will run between $40-$50 when it’s made available later this year, but I expect you’ll find compatible versions from other sellers for as little as $20 by 2027.

Quick side note: If you like the idea of highly repairable headphones, be sure to take a look at the Fender Audio Mix and the remarkably similar Fairphone Fairbuds XL.

For me, they’ve proven to be very comfortable headphones, whether I’m wearing eyeglasses or not. The headband creates just enough clamping force to keep them from moving about. I don’t recommend them for the gym or running -- I found their grip too gentle for those activities. If the gym is your thing, check out Sennheiser’s more budget-friendly Accentum Wireless or Accentum Plus Wireless. They’ve got an octopus-like clamping force and I guarantee they won’t budge under heavy use.

Even though there are now wear sensors inside each of the Momentum 5’s redesigned earcups (making music auto-pause/resume more accurate regardless of which side you remove), they feel a little roomier than before, which I prefer to the shallow earcups on Sony’s XM6. And I love that Sennheiser is one of the few headphone companies that gives you 180 degrees of earcup rotation, letting you decide if you want the cushions face-down or up, when worn around your neck. Another rarity: a five-segment LED battery meter, which takes the guesswork out of your charge status.

The only critique I’ll level at Sennheiser’s design is that it may feel a little too conservative for some buyers. For those who want their $400 headphones to look like $400 headphones, the Momentum aren’t as successful as Bose’s QuietComfort Ultra (2nd Gen), which use polished aluminum headband components for a decidedly luxe look.

Upgraded ANC

Active noise cancellation and transparency are at the heart of most wireless headphones these days, and thanks to an ANC arms race, they get a little better each year. I think Bose’s QuietComfort Ultra (2nd Gen) still offer the quietest experience for most daily routines like commuting to work, flying, or working in your local coffee shop, but it’s now a toss-up as to who I’d pick for second place. Probably Sony’s WH-1000XM6. But maybe the Momentum 5 Wireless? Honestly, without scientific testing gear, it’s too close to call.

You may find that ANC effectiveness can be compromised by some glasses styles. I recently switched to a frame with fairly thick limbs and noticed the difference immediately. This isn’t specific to the Momentum 5; the QuietComfort Ultra (2nd Gen) and XM6 both performed better without glasses, too.

Transparency is an even harder evaluation: Apple’s AirPods Max series were, for years, the leaders for the most natural-sounding, can’t-believe-I’m-wearing-headphones experience. Today, I think Bose, Sony, and Sennheiser all strike within 99% of Apple’s benchmark.

Where the Momentum 5 enjoy a slight edge is their ANC/transparency gesture control. Using the equivalent of a pinch-to-zoom move with your thumb and forefinger (or really, any two digits) you can increase and decrease the amount of noise canceling, from full transparency to full ANC, in increments. I’m an all-or-nothing kinda guy, so I didn’t use it much, but it works well.

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Still got that Sennheiser sound

As I foreshadowed in the intro, the Momentum 5 are in the goldilocks zone for tuning if you like your headphones to take a mostly hands-off approach to your tunes.

If you’re not sure, here’s what it means in practice: Superb clarity and detail. The Momentum 5 reward quiet-space critical listening. This is especially true when taking advantage of their advanced codec compatibility and USB Audio, which can deliver hi-res lossless audio from a smartphone or laptop at up to 24-bit/96kHz — the gold standard for very picky audiophiles (the previous gen was limited to 16-bit/48kHz).

That feature (wired USB Audio) can be enjoyed by just about everyone. The wireless equivalent (Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Sound with aptX Lossless), on the other hand, is something only a small handful of buyers will get to hear.

Even with the optional bass boost mode, these cans don’t get as low as Sony’s XM6. Which isn’t to say that bass is somehow underwhelming -- far from it. Tracks that depend on solid bass response, like Billie Eilish’s skull-thumping bad guy, are very well rendered. But if you like deep, powerful, and resonant lows, the Momentum 5 stop short of that experience.

Normally, I don’t get great results when using app-based personalized EQ schemes, but Sennheiser’s Sound Personalization accurately diagnosed my slight high-frequency hearing loss and gave me a boost in that part of the spectrum and significantly improved my enjoyment. So much so, that I ended up keeping it on for much of my listening.

I can’t say the same of the Momentum 5’s new Immersive Audio “Optimized for Dolby Atmos” feature.

If you’re listening to stereo, it gives you two options: Enhance that stereo sound through a virtual 3D effect, which makes the soundstage wider and deeper. Or enhance it further by adding head-tracking, which attempts to keep the main music elements (typically vocals) locked in front of you, even as you turn your head side-to-side. It sort of simulates a live music experience.

I’ll say this — it works, and I’m glad Sennheiser added it. However, it’s rare that I hit a stereo track that sounds better to me in this mode.

In theory, if you’re already listening to Dolby Atmos content, Immersive Audio won’t alter the sound (because adding an additional 3D effect to an already 3D format would be bad), so the only reason to use it is to turn on head-tracking. In reality, it does affect the sound, dropping perceived loudness a bit and pushing the center channel vocals backward in the soundstage.

Sennheiser says this is a necessary adjustment to let head-tracking do its thing without causing clipping (distortion) at high volumes. Again, I think it’s a nice-to-have add on, but not a reason to buy the Momentum 5.

Unfortunately, Sound Personalization and Immersive Audio are incompatible — you have to pick one or the other.

Not-quite-crisp calls

Call quality on the Momentum 5 is good, with a noticeable improvement in voice quality over the Momentum 4. However, Sennheiser still has some algorithm tuning to do if it wants to compete with leaders in headphone calling. Wind was audible when conditions went above a light breeze and while most background noises were eliminated, you could tell when the software was doing so — the louder the background noise, the more my voice would wobble and fade in and out.

Don’t be surprised if your callers ask if you’re a spot with bad cellphone reception when this happens.

In quiet, windless conditions, everything performs well, and I was especially happy with transparency mode on calls. To me, this is a must-have feature if you regularly take calls with your headphones. It makes for a more natural experience and reduces the fatigue of doing multiple, long calls. If you’re in a noisy environment, you can always engage the ANC if you need it.

The Sennheiser Momentum 5 Wireless boast an impressive number of features, but there’s one omission that’s particularly glaring: No Auracast support.

Auracast is a handy way to share your device’s audio with another person, but in the future, it will enable a host of additional scenarios — everything from being able to hear the TV at your gym, to getting vital terminal announcements while you’re waiting for your flight.

What’s strange is that Sennheiser added Auracast to its Momentum 4 True Wireless earbuds in 2024, and Accentum True Wireless in 2025.

Should you buy them?

Sennheiser’s Momentum 5 Wireless are the headphones Sennheiser needed and the ones that fans wanted: a set of cans that keeps the brand’s signature sound, closes most of the ANC and call-quality gap with Sony and Bose, and — thanks to that replaceable battery — might be the first flagship in this category actually built to outlast its warranty. If you’re already a Momentum fan, this is a no-brainer. And even if you’re not, they should be on your shortlist.

If you’re wondering if you should spend a bit more for the Sony WH-1000XM6 or Bose QuietComfort Ultra (2nd Gen), ask yourself these questions:

• Is a more-than-24-hour battery life important? Stick with Sennheiser. Same thing for repairability.

• Do you love bass? If so, Sony’s XM6 offers impressively resonant lows.

• Prefer physical controls to touch? Bose still uses touch for volume adjustments, but all other functions use a button. Sony and Sennheiser are both heavily geared toward touch controls.

• Do you find it hard to get a comfortable fit? In my experience, more people find Bose’s cans to be better for long-term comfort, myself included.

• Do you do a lot of calls? Both the XM6 and QuietComfort Ultra (2nd Gen) outperform the Momentum 5 Wireless for call quality.

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Hey, are you familiar with Qualcomm’s aptX Adaptive and aptX Lossless Bluetooth codecs?

My guess is that, for most of you, the answer is no, or maybe a shrugged “sorta?”

It’s OK, you’re not alone. But it’s a sad reality given that Sennheiser has not only added these codecs to its Momentum 5 Wireless headphones, but has also provided users an unusual level of control over how these codecs work inside the Smart Control Plus mobile app.

I’ll explain in a moment, but first, here’s the reason you’ve probably never heard of these codecs, and why you likely can’t take advantage of them.

The cavernous codec caveat

Codecs are the unsung heroes of the Bluetooth audio world. They’re responsible for compressing digital sound down to a size that can be reliably transmitted over Bluetooth links, which can be notoriously unstable at times.

The basic codecs that ship with nearly every Bluetooth device (SBC and AAC) do a decent job, but because they’re “lossy” codecs, they often strip away a lot of information.

Better codecs exist — much better in fact — but they suffer from an adoption and compatibility problem. You can only take advantage of a codec when both the source device, like a phone, and a receiving device, like headphones, support it. If either device doesn’t support the codec in question, they fall back on the ones they share in common, which is likely SBC or AAC.

And you may be surprised to learn that Apple iPhones only support SBC and AAC. Google Pixel phones add LDAC (a high-quality codec from Sony). Samsung phones also have LDAC as well as Samsung’s own proprietary SSC codec.

Those Qualcomm codecs I mentioned in the intro — aptX Adaptive and aptX Lossless? They’re two of the most advanced codecs so far, enabling both CD quality and hi-res audio over Bluetooth …

… and they aren’t supported on any iPhone, Pixel, or Samsung phone. In North America, that means a staggering 80% of in-use mobile phones aren’t compatible.

Wait. I can’t use these new codecs … ever?

Even though your phone or laptop doesn’t support Qualcomm’s codecs, you can still use them — it just isn’t free, and you’ll need to use an accessory.

There are two products that I’m aware of that give your device aptX Adaptive and aptX Lossless:

• Questyle QCC Dongle Pro

• Sennheiser BTD 700

Of these, I’ve only used the Questyle, which works very well. Just one word of caution before you buy any adapter: Double-check that it supports the codecs you need. Many models work with aptX Adaptive, but don’t support aptX Lossless.

What’s so great about aptX Adaptive and aptX Lossless?

In a word: More.

Our two default codecs, SBC and AAC could actually sound way better if they were allowed to use more bandwidth. Technically, they’re both capable of doing so, but they were introduced at a time when Bluetooth’s maximum bandwidth was smaller.

As a result, SBC typically runs at 192 kbps to 328 kbps while AAC hits its ceiling at 256 kbps on iPhones and up to 320 kbps on Android. When you consider that uncompressed CD quality requires 1,411 kbps, it’s easy to see how much info is lost.

aptX Adaptive is built on newer technology. It can, depending on the audio you’re playing, run as high as 860 kbps. It’s still a lossy codec (like SBC and AAC), but when you don’t throw away as much info, more detail is preserved.

aptX Adaptive, as its name suggests, can also respond to changing Bluetooth connection speeds. It can ramp its bandwidth up and down in 10 kbps increments so that it always provides you with the highest quality your connection allows. SBC and AAC can’t adjust to Bluetooth conditions at all.

aptX Lossless is the first lossless Bluetooth codec. Under specific conditions, it can compress and transmit audio at CD quality without losing any info.

It achieves its impressive sound quality by using far more data than a lossy codec. This is only possible when the Bluetooth connection is managed by two Qualcomm chip-equipped devices, which helps to explain why it won’t work on Apple and Google phones — they don’t use Qualcomm’s chips. Samsung does use Qualcomm chips, but it refuses to enable Snapdragon Sound, the licensed platform that’s required for aptX Lossless.

Cleverly, when aptX Lossless senses that the connection is no longer robust enough to support its massive appetite for bandwidth (1200 kbps), it can seamlessly convert over to aptX Adaptive’s lossy compression until things improve.

OK, that’s a lot of specs and numbers. Bottom line, do they sound better?

So, yes. But also, it depends.

You can think of codecs like aptX Adaptive and aptX Lossless as performance enhancers. If you’ve got access to lossless and/or hi-res audio, and if your Bluetooth connection is solid, and if your headphones or earbuds already offer really good sound, using either of these codecs can absolutely improve the sound versus SBC or AAC.

However, don’t expect an equally big difference between aptX Adaptive and aptX Lossless. As I proved to myself a few years ago, it can be a lot harder to tell them apart.

Here’s the “depends” part: These codecs will not take already heavily compressed audio and make it better. They also can’t magically make a budget set of wireless earbuds sound like ones that cost $399.

You should also consider how and where you listen. If you mostly use your wireless headphones walking to work, at the gym, on airplanes, or anywhere else that might have substantial background noise, I don’t think you’ll be able to appreciate the subtle improvements these codecs offer.

How can you tell if you’re using aptX Lossless (or Adaptive)?

The challenge with Qualcomm’s system is that it relies on phone and wireless accessory manufacturers to tell users what’s going on under the hood. If these companies decide not to do so, it’s impossible to know if your products are actually using aptX Lossless or aptX Adaptive — or maybe another codec.

Case in point: Bose’s QuietComfort Ultra 2 Headphones are aptX Lossless compatible. When I connect them to an aptX Lossless source device, like Questyle’s excellent QCC Dongle Pro adapter, I should get CD-quality sound if I’m listening to a lossless CD-quality song from say, Apple Music, Tidal, Amazon Music, or Spotify Premium.

The Dongle Pro isn’t very helpful. It sees aptX Lossless and aptX Adaptive as essentially a single codec. It doesn’t even have an aptX Lossless indicator.

The Bose app confirms the headphones are connected to (and streaming from) the Dongle Pro, but is silent on the nature of that connection. It doesn’t list any active codec. Am I getting aptX Lossless? Maybe. Could I figure it out just based on what I’m hearing? Possibly. But if you’re like me, you like a little confirmation that what you’re hearing is the best it can be.

Sennheiser’s smart control

Which brings us back to Sennheiser.

Its aptly named Smart Control Plus mobile app provides the missing aptX connection information, but perhaps more importantly, it gives you control over how the Sennheiser Momentum 5 Wireless work with these codecs.

As you can see in some of the screenshots, the Audio Mode Priority screen lets you toggle support for Hi-Res 24-bit/96kHz and Lossless 16-bit/44.1kHz independently. It doesn’t say so explicitly, but these refer to aptX Adaptive and aptX Lossless respectively.

I’ve seen companion apps that let you turn aptX Adaptive on and off, but Sennheiser is the first I’ve come across that add the extra granularity of aptX Lossless control.

Then, in the Device Setting screen, you get confirmation of what’s actually happening. The Codec section reveals the active aptX codec, along with the sampling frequency it’s processing.

This is the critical piece. If you’re streaming CD quality at 16/44.1, and the Sennheiser app confirms the headphones are streaming at 16/44.1 using aptX Lossless, that’s your reassurance that everything is working optimally.

Why switch between Lossless and Adaptive?

If you leave both the Hi-Res 24-bit/96kHz and Lossless 16-bit/44.1kHz toggles turned on, the Qualcomm chips will do their best to select the right codec based on your Bluetooth link and your source material.

If they see you’re playing lossless 16-bit and you’ve got a strong link, aptX Lossless will be used. If not, you’ll probably get aptX Adaptive. For most people, this is the best option and as I mentioned above, the app will tell you which codec is in use.

But there may be rare times when you want to specify. Someone with an extensive CD collection may reason that disabling Hi-Res 24-bit/96kHz prevents their 16-bit lossless tracks from undergoing lossy conversion.

The same could be true in reverse if you’re mostly streaming hi-res audio.

But in the end, because aptX Lossless will always switch to Adaptive if it can’t maintain a fast link, these toggles represent best-effort preferences, not forced behaviors.

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You can almost hear the collective held breath and the tentative, walking-on-eggshells approach that Sonos CEO Tom Conrad, and his team are taking at the moment. And well they should.

No one at the company has forgotten the “profound mistake” made in May 2024, when, under the leadership of Patrick Spence, Sonos launched a redesign of its mobile app.

That redesign was so poorly executed, and so poorly received by customers, that the company’s stock began a slide that shaved 50% of its value over the following 12 months. It also ended Spence’s eight-year run as CEO.

Since then, Sonos has been triaging the fixes. It started with the missing and broken features, moved on to performance bugs and now, more than two years after the launch, it’s giving some much-needed attention to the user interface.

However, unlike in 2024, the changes are being rolled out slowly and they can be turned on and off with a single tap. It’s a cautious, controlled, and considered approach, and who can blame Sonos for that?

In the current version of the app (v87), at the top of the Settings screen, is a switch labeled “Enable Improved Navigation.”

Turn it on, and you’ll see a new set of persistent tabs at the bottom of the app, for Home, System, and Search. Within the System tab, you can now pin your favorite speakers to the top of the list and choose their order. And tapping on the volume slider reveals +/- buttons on either end for more fine-grained control than swiping your finger.

Sonos says it’s using this polite opt-in period to gather feedback and won’t make the changes the default until “feedback settles.”

Here’s my feedback: The changes are good but they don’t go far enough.

Bringing back the tabs

This is the smartest part of the redesign. It acknowledges that some parts of the user interface must be persistent to avoid a lot of unnecessary tapping and overlapping screens.

I like that instead of just bringing back the original five tabs (favorites, music sources, speaker selection, search, and system settings), Sonos has found a way to use just three (Home, System, and Search). I also like that on the iOS version, these tabs reflect Apple’s new Liquid Glass look and feel.

Home needs more help

The Home screen is unchanged, and that’s a problem. It continues to rely on a horizontally banded set of carousels, with almost no customization.

Take the Music Services section. You can’t expand it to see all of your services as a grid, and you can’t reorder them. You can only pick one preferred service, which is listed first; all of the others are then presented alphabetically.

Sonos Favorites suffers from the same lack of personalization.

System is slick

If your Sonos ecosystem is modest — maybe two or three speakers — you may not have given a lot of thought to the System tab. It can display three components at once, with no scrolling.

Four or more, however, and you become aware of the app’s preference for alphabetical lists.

I’m delighted that there’s now a sort and a pin menu. You can change the sort from the default alphabetical to either Actively Playing or Frequently Used, but I suspect most folks will want to pin.

With pinning, you choose the speakers you want at the top of the list, and they can be reordered any time. Brilliant.

Still searching

I’ve always said that Sonos’ universal search is its single best feature. For those of us with massive personal music libraries and multiple streaming services, being able to enter a keyword and get matches from all of these sources is awesome.

And now that we can flip back and forth between the Search and System pages, we’re almost back to the level of convenience the original design provided.

I say “almost,” because Sonos’ interface experts and I still have a beef over how people search.

Maybe it’s just me (entirely possible), but when you search for, say, Buddy Guy, you’re probably not thinking “I need to see which services have matching content.”

My guess is that you actually want to play some Buddy Guy. The only question that matters is, “Do you want to play one of his songs, one of his albums, or are you looking for playlists that contain his music?”

The same is true if you’re going for something less specific like a mood, e.g., high energy. Are you really concerned about what Apple Music considers the top matches for high energy, or do you want to see everyone’s matches for artists, albums, songs, and playlists, so you can quickly get to what you want?

Only once you’ve identified the kind of content you want does it become relevant to see which services have matches.

Here’s the kicker: Sonos’ search used to work this way. It changed with the 2024 redesign.

Now, results are always filtered by music service first (and alphabetically, of course). You can drill down into any of these services to then find songs, albums, etc. But at that point, if you can’t find what you want, you’ll need to jump into one of your other sources.

Too little, too late?

I’m thrilled Sonos is finally addressing the user experience problems it introduced in 2024. I’m also dismayed at how long it took to get here, and how few actual changes have been made.

In fairness, Sonos has said we can expect more soon, like the desperately needed return of iOS lock screen controls. However, even that update feels underwhelming given that it’s simply bringing back a feature we used to have.

Sonos has spent the last two years making its customers wonder if they should switch to another system. Bose has positioned its new Lifestyle Ultra speakers and soundbars as an app-free Sonos alternative*, and Wiim continues to make the case that its ecosystem is superior to Sonos, at least as far as its software is concerned.

The navigation improvements may slow the rate of customer defections but they’re hardly cause for celebration. And they do nothing to prove that Sonos is still capable of innovation.

Sonos has always bet its identity — for better or worse — on its software chops over its hardware-building pedigree. Until 2024, I’d argue that was a smart bet.

Now, however, that identity is bloodied and bruised. If the company wants to return to growth and profitability, and if it wants to put a smile on its customers’ faces, it needs to prove once again, that no one does audio software as well as Sonos.

It’s time for Sonos to step up.

*Almost app-free. You still need to use the Bose app for setup and EQ tweaks, but all search, playback, and multi-speaker management is now done through third-party apps and protocols like Apple AirPlay and Google Cast.

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The audio world is full of buzzwords, specs, and branded features. Each year, the list gets longer, and companies compete with each other to see which one can offer the longest list.

You can see this play out on Amazon’s product pages. Even a budget-priced set of wireless earbuds can have an extensive list of specs.

Since so few of us have the chance to actually try these products, there’s a strong tendency to adopt a checklist approach to buying.

Hi-res audio certification? Check.

Support for advanced Bluetooth codecs? Check.

Spatial audio mode with head tracking? Check.

This tendency is even stronger in the hi-fi and audiophile communities, where obsessing over the composition of a cable, the total harmonic distortion (THD) of an amplifier, or the clock jitter timing of a digital-to-analog converter (DAC), can take on a religious zeal.

There’s nothing wrong with ensuring that a product delivers on a certain set of technical expectations. But before you realize it, the checklist has become a stand-in for what matters most: Does it sound good?

As a tech journalist and product reviewer, I’m more aware of this trap than most folks. It’s a professional hazard. The more you learn about how the sausage is made, the more you feel compelled to focus on the ingredients.

This week, as I began researching an upcoming series of articles on Dolby Atmos, I learned that even the people who create the music we adore wrestle with this issue.

It came up during my interview with Guy Fletcher, who, in addition to being an accomplished musician, composer, and audio engineer, is also the person who created the Dolby Atmos mix of Dire Straits’ famous album, Brothers In Arms.

I assumed that, given his facility with the technology of music making, he would be fanatical about achieving a specs-based perfection in his work.

But not only did Guy teach himself how to play by ear — remarkably, he never learned to read music — but he also relies on that hearing-first approach to guide his production process.

“I would much rather trust my ears than trust a scope or a reading or a measurement,” he told me during our chat. It’s not that Guy ignores technical elements. “Measurements are valid and we need measurements to align rooms and do everything that we need to set up a studio control room.” But he’s not ruled by them.

“The bottom line to me has always been, if it sounds good, then it is good.”

It’s a motto that he inherited from his late father, Ted Fletcher, the pioneering audio designer behind the Alice range of mixers and the JoeMeek range of preamps and compressors.

That struck a chord with me. If it’s true that we, as buyers of audio gear, can be lulled into thinking of a spec sheet as a substitute for what we would hear if we could actually try the product, then it’s also true that an audio engineer, staring at a scope instead of trusting what they’re hearing, is making the same trade. The Fletchers had every excuse to let the readout make the decision for them. They didn’t.

Specs matter, as do features, design, materials, etc., because they signify a product’s potential. But they’re not a guarantee of how a set of headphones or a full home theater will sound.

As you’ll see over the next few weeks as I dive into Dolby Atmos, it can be a rabbit hole of technical considerations. Multiple channels, lossy and lossless compression, discrete versus virtualized speakers, binaural rendering … it’s a long list.

I’m not going to shy away from that list — it’s essential to understanding how Atmos works. But the goal isn’t to arm you with a checklist.

The goal is to explain how these specs and features combine to deliver the sound you hear, and why, even when everything looks right on paper, what matters most is: if it sounds good, then it is good.

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No company has done more to champion the spatial audio era of music than Apple. Its AirPods family of wireless headphones add advanced support for the format, and Apple Music has been actively incentivizing record labels and independent artists to submit Dolby Atmos Music mixes to its catalog.

Unfortunately, in its enthusiasm for Dolby Atmos, Apple Music has made it hard — really hard — for people to switch between Dolby Atmos and standard stereo on their phones, when using non-Apple or Beats headphones.

I haven’t magically fixed this omission, but I’ve come really close and so can you.

Apple Music’s missing Atmos switch

There’s no Dolby Atmos < - > Stereo toggle in Apple Music itself. Instead, the setting is buried many layers deep inside the iPhone’s Settings app:

Settings > Apps > Music > Audio, Dolby Atmos > [Automatic | Always On | Off]

You’d think that Automatic would be the best option. Who doesn’t want things to be automatic? But that option only works when you’re using Apple or Beats wireless headphones.

When you’re using AirPods in Automatic mode, Apple Music will automatically play the Atmos version of a song when it exists, and stereo when it doesn’t. At any time, you can swipe down from the top of your iPhone screen, then long-press on the volume slider. You can then easily switch from Spatial Audio On (Fixed or Head Tracked) to stereo (Spatial Audio Off), or, if the track you’re listening to is only in stereo, you can turn on Fixed or Head Tracked spatialization (which makes stereo sound a little more like Atmos).

Without AirPods or Beats headphones, Automatic doesn’t do anything. You’ll only get stereo, even if the song your listening to has an Atmos version.

Instead, to hear Atmos (when available), you need to set Apple Music’s Atmos switch to Always On, at which point iOS will remind you that BAD THINGS MAY HAPPEN.

Ok, not really. But it is true that Apple Music will start to give you Atmos whenever it can. And on some connected speakers, including your car stereo, it could sound way worse than regular stereo (the version of Atmos that an iPhone generates is only intended for headphones and earbuds, not speakers).

So now you’re always getting Atmos when available, which is great, right up until the point where you decide you’d prefer to hear the stereo version of the song your listening to. Now you’re stuck.

With Apple Music, it’s really hard to simply search for and play the non-Atmos version of a song once you’re in Always On mode. You may get lucky and find a stereo-only version as part of someone else’s compilation album, but that’s only going to work for major hit songs.

The workaround is to dive back into your Settings app and switch the Dolby Atmos setting to Off, which works similarly to Automatic for non-Apple headphones. But this, as you’ll recall, turns Atmos off entirely.

Sigh.

In a perfect world, Apple Music would use the same superb interface shortcut as Amazon Music. When playing a song in Amazon Music, you can tap on the quality display and if the song is available in both Atmos and stereo, you can instantly flip between them.

In our decidedly less-than-perfect world, we need to get creative if we want Apple Music to give us more control over our spatial audio listening.

A shortcut to more control

Here’s the (sort of) fix: Use iOS’s Shortcuts app to reduce the process from a long, five-step sequence, to a much faster two-step system.

If you’re not familiar with Shortcuts, it’s like a mini app builder for the iPhone (or iPad). Old folks like me can think of it like a macro recorder. Shortcuts gives you a menu of objects, actions, and triggers, which can be combined to do a huge variety of tasks that would otherwise take much longer on your own.

Sadly, Apple doesn’t let you create a shortcut that turns Atmos on/off in AppIe Music — that would be too handy. But I was able to use it to worm my way into iOS’s Settings app, all the way down to the screen that does let you turn it on and off.

That’s it. That’s the band-aid solution that we shouldn’t need: A shortcut that can be saved to your iPhone home screen as its own icon, and will open the Settings page we need to toggle Atmos.

I’ll include the instructions below, or you know, you could just install mine.

Want an even faster way to get there?

If you have an iPhone with an Action Button, go to your main iPhone Settings > Action Button, swipe left until you get to Shortcut, and choose your new shortcut. After that, a long-press of the Action Button will instantly pull up your Atmos audio toggles.

Apple Music Dolby Atmos Toggle Shortcut recipe

To test your new Shortcut, tap the Play arrow at the bottom of the screen. It should take you directly to the Dolby Atmos toggle settings page.

Now your Shortcut has been created, you can give it a custom icon and add it to your home screen. Just tap the Shortcut name at the top of that screen and look for the relevant options.

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Every music streaming platform is grappling with AI.

Some, like Bandcamp, have banned it outright. Others are using a combination of technology and fierce penalties to keep 100% AI generated music from taking over their platforms, while still paying royalties to AI creators.

Tidal has taken a third path, and as far as I can tell, no other major service has gone this far: As long as the AI content doesn’t violate its rules, it can live alongside Tidal’s human-created catalog. But there’s no “monetization” mechanism. Tidal won’t pay any royalties to those who create and distribute AI generated content.

It’s a policy that exceeds even Deezer’s own AI rules, which until now were considered some of the strictest. Deezer tags fully AI-generated tracks, pulls them from its recommendations and playlists, and strips out the fraudulent streams that make up the bulk of AI listening. But on legitimate streams (when a real person deliberately chooses an AI track), Deezer still pays royalties.

Tidal’s message appears to be, we respect that AI is a legitimate way to create music, but we don’t think creators should be paid for doing so.

Don’t break the rules

Tidal, like the other major streaming platforms, has drawn a line in the sand regarding what kind of AI music is acceptable. It starts with a definition:

Tidal defines AI-generated music as music that is “wholly or substantially generated by generative artificial intelligence”.

So if you’ve used AI to generate a few effects or samples for use in an otherwise entirely human-created track, you’re not considered an AI music creator. You can breathe a sigh of relief.

Tidal then describes what’s off-limits …

“We will not tolerate AI-generated music that exploits an individual’s or group’s music, name or likeness, deceives listeners, or diminishes the quality of our service. Effective mid-July, AI-generated music associated with fraudulent activity will be blocked or removed from our platform. Fraudulent activity includes (but is not necessarily limited to) AI-generated music that aims to deceive listeners, interfere with authentic artists and their audience, or involves high-volume uploads or unusual streaming activity.”

… and explains its decision to deny revenue:

“Starting today, AI-generated music will not be monetizable. [...] Tidal’s priority is ensuring royalties go to original works directly produced, written, and performed by people. We will therefore not knowingly attribute royalties to music we identify as wholly AI-generated.”

Keeping AI out of the pool

It’s worth pausing here to understand how subscription services like Tidal pay artists, because it explains why it chose to draw the line where it did.

Most services, including Tidal, use a pro-rata / streamshare royalty model. This creates a single pool of money, which in Tidal’s case is exclusively funded through listener subscriptions, and paid out to artists based on their overall share of platform streams.

The danger in this system is the ease with which AI music can flood the platform. Since algorithms are often the way recommendations are processed, an unlabeled or inaccurately labeled AI song could end up with a ton of streams, thereby displacing songs by human musicians.

Since the pool is finite, human artists struggling to build an audience could find their small monthly royalties reduced to nothing, and even major stars like Drake and Taylor Swift might see a dip in payouts.

A new scarlet letter

The problem is, it’s getting harder to automatically identify AI music. As part of its effort to prevent AI music from passing itself off as human-created, Tidal is going to start a new tagging and display regimen that will eventually put the onus on the music distribution companies that supply Tidal (and others):

“Tidal will identify and tag AI-generated music. Listeners should know whether content they are listening to is AI-generated. To start, listeners will see an icon next to content we identify as 100% AI-generated. This feature will start appearing for listeners in mid-July. As AI-detection methods become more reliable, we will expand this tag to content that is substantially AI-generated. But the responsibility to identify and tag AI-generated content should not rest with Tidal alone. We expect — and will begin to enforce — that content distributors identify AI-generated content before it reaches our platform.”

In practice, the tagging is quite subtle. My Tidal contact kindly provided the screenshot below, as a demo of how AI tagging will appear on the platform.

The small “AI” block will appear next to all identified song titles, and on an album that has at least one identified AI music track.

Curiously, Tidal won’t apply the label to the creators themselves, regardless of how much of their catalog has been flagged as AI-generated.

Finally, Tidal makes it clear that AI music creators won’t be able to use the company’s Tidal Upload feature (which lets small artists share their music on Tidal and even do direct-to-fans sales in the U.S.) to do an end-run around these rules.

“If we have reason to believe that Upload content is wholly AI-generated, it will be tagged as such, and blocked from direct-to-fan monetization.”

An artistic contradiction?

Both Tidal’s tagging and no-revenue policies regarding AI music are consistent with its own description as “an artist-first, fan-centered music streaming platform”.

Where things get a little uncomfortable is Tidal’s additional marketing language around its support of creators.

On Tidal’s About page, the third pillar of its platform says:

“Commitment to the Art — We empower artists to create and deliver their art exactly as they intended.”

In its AI policy, it points out that sometimes that “art” will be the byproduct of AI:

“Artificial intelligence and machine learning are not new to music creation, they have just become more commonplace and advanced [...] Artists should have the freedom to create with AI tools, and listeners should have the autonomy to choose the type of content they consume.”

And yet, when it comes to AI-generated music (as Tidal defines it), its financial commitment to the art has strict limits.

Curiously, the company chose to leave the door open, just a crack, to the possibility of future monetization:

“We acknowledge the ongoing debate regarding whether certain AI-generated music (e.g. AI-generated music developed from fairly and properly licensed models) should be entitled to earn royalties. This debate will continue as the technology advances and rightsholders and AI music platforms develop licensing models.”

No matter how sophisticated AI music gets, I will continue to seek out human musicians. The music is, obviously, the most important thing, but it’s not the only thing. It’s the humans behind the music that I find so compelling.

Would Phil Collins’ In The Air Tonight hit with such raw emotion if I knew it had been prompted into existence? Would I enjoy Lenny Kravitz’s Cab Driver if it had been written by an AI, knowing that no robot has ever faced blatant discrimination while trying to hail a taxi in New York City? And will an AI song ever embed itself deeper in my soul through a live performance the way Won’t Get Fooled Again did when I finally saw The Who in Toronto in 2022?

I don’t think so.

Still, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that AI music has no value, or that those who create it shouldn’t be compensated in any way if the tracks they produce find an audience.

What’s your take on AI music? Let me know in the comments.

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A back-and-forth battle

​Before I jump into the full review, let me briefly set the table …

For years, Bose’s soundbars have competed with Sonos. Both companies offer the same fundamental promise: Great sound, elegant design, and a super-simple set up. But historically, Sonos had an edge.

The Sonos app gave its soundbars music streaming superpowers, while its ecosystem of wireless speakers and subwoofers, could add to the cinematic immersion, or be used independently in any other room, for a huge range of expansion options. Bose’s app wasn’t as powerful or as polished, and its limited set of accessory speakers and subs could only be used in tandem with its soundbars, not on their own.

Fast forward to 2026, and things look different. Sonos has continued to create amazing soundbars and speakers, but a disastrous app redesign in 2024 rendered a lot of customers’ systems unusable. The company fired its CEO and began the process of restoring features and stability, a task that is still not 100% complete.

With Sonos customer satisfaction at an all-time low, Bose made two small but important pivots: It introduced its new Lifestyle Ultra family of wireless speakers, starting with the Lifestyle Ultra Soundbar ($1,099) and Lifestyle Ultra Speaker ($299), and it made a conscious decision not to compete with Sonos’ app. In fact, it ran in the opposite direction. For daily TV and music listening, the Lifestyle family is almost app-less.

Though it has never said so, Bose is using these shifts to reposition itself from being just a Sonos competitor to the Sonos alternative. I’m just not sure it worked.

… OK, now for the review.

Bose Lifestyle Ultra Soundbar

Product Score: 3.5/5

Pros:

• Beautifully designed

• Very easy set up

• Robust bass, excellent dialogue clarity

Cons:

• You’ll need the app more than you think

• Stereo sounds a little constrained compared to other speakers at this price

• No Dolby Atmos Music without a TV or streaming device

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Bose Lifestyle Ultra Soundbar: Smarter and simpler

As soon as you open the box, it’s obvious that Bose wants the Lifestyle Ultra Soundbar to be super simple to set up and use. You get the soundbar itself, a power cord, and an HDMI cable. That’s it.

If all you want is better sound for your TV plus Bluetooth music streaming, simply plug the soundbar into your TV via HDMI, then plug it into the wall. As soon as you fire up your TV, it should automatically recognize the Lifestyle Ultra and you’re good to go.

However, if you want to make any changes to soundbar’s audio settings (like dialogue mode) the Bose app for iPhone/Android is essential, because the Lifestyle Ultra is one of the first Bose speakers to ship without a remote.

The Bose app also connects the soundbar to your home Wi-Fi for hi-res streaming and (optionally) Amazon Alexa, it provides an interface for adding surrounds and a subwoofer, plus, it’s the only way to do room calibration: the company also nixed its AdaptIQ room calibration microphone (a wired, head-worn device that no one will miss).

Without a remote, Bose took a page out of Sonos’ playbook: The Lifestyle Ultra has a full set of top-mounted touch controls for volume and playback, something its predecessors lacked. Bose’s original contribution is a circular shape that acts like a virtual volume knob. Swiping your finger clockwise or counterclockwise around the perimeter slowly raises or lowers volume.

Thankfully, Bose has kept one of its best soundbar design elements — the Lifestyle Ultra is topped with an elegant glass surface. Yes, it’s a fingerprint magnet and also highly reflective, but when it’s freshly wiped, it looks amazing. The new fabric grille is also a nice touch, adding a soft, rounded accent to a class of device that’s often made from a hard plastic shell.

The Bose app: almost unnecessary

The Bose Music app (which managed the company’s older models) was a kind of Sonos-lite experience, with a few integrated streaming music services and the ability to manage and group multiple Bose speakers. The new, unified Bose app, eliminates these features.

The goal is to give you a simple, one-app experience. Pick your preferred music app and then use either Apple AirPlay 2, Google Cast, or, worst-case scenario, Bluetooth, to connect to the soundbar and play your tunes.

If Bose hadn’t axed its physical remote, you might be able to completely avoid the Bose app after the initial setup. But that’s not quite the case.

In reality, you’ll need the app to manage important settings like EQ (treble, midrange, and bass), volume levels for center, height, and surround channels, turning dialogue enhancement on/off, and to validate the sound format the soundbar is receiving (a vital piece of info if you’re working with Dolby Atmos).

Movie and TV sound: much bigger bass, crisp dialogue

Soundbars often suffer from weak bass. It’s why a separate subwoofer is almost always a recommended add-on. Bose’s Lifestyle Ultra Soundbar definitely sounds more cinematic and impactful when paired with the Lifestyle Ultra Subwoofer ($899), but the good news is it also sounds pretty great on its own.

Cranking the bass level to +10 in the Bose app unleashes enough low-end punch to bring Hollywood action flicks to life. We’re not talking about window-shattering, heart attack-inducing bass by any means, but for a lot of folks, it’s going to be more than enough — especially if your neighbors are prone to complaining.

Dialogue is another gotcha area for many TV speakers. As more content gets mixed for multichannel audio, the all-important center channel (where dialogue lives) can get drowned out by the rest of the soundtrack. You may be able to get sufficiently clear speech just by tweaking the treble and center channel levels in the Bose app.

But for a true silver bullet, enable the SpeechClarity option (and then select one of three enhancement levels). After struggling through some seriously muddy dialogue at the start of The Fall Guy, I flipped SpeechClarity on and things were instantly clearer.

The Lifestyle Ultra Soundbar’s spatial audio capabilities are on-point too, with very good virtual surround sound and height effects. Playing through my usual Dolby Atmos test clips from titles like No Time To Die, Unbroken, Mad Max: Fury Road, and Dune, was a lot of fun; if you’ve never experienced a Dolby Atmos movie via a premium soundbar, you’re in for a treat.

Music: satisfying but conservative

Music playback has always been one of Bose’s strong points and the Lifestyle Ultra Soundbar continues that tradition.

Out of the box, you get what I’ve come to think of as the “Bose sound”, a balance of frequencies that favors the upper-midrange and highs, with a bright, sparkly feel. You notice it most with female vocalists and cymbal hits.

On Bose’s headphones, I like this tuning, but listening out loud in my TV room — a space that is far from acoustically perfect — I prefer to dial that brightness back a bit. Thankfully the Bose app makes this easy.

Soundbars are rarely fabulous speakers for stereo sound. The maximum separation for their left/right channels is defined by the width or the soundbar itself, which will be too narrow for most rooms.

However, with the careful application of digital processing, a soundbar can cheat its way to bigger, wider sound, using the same software tools that let it work with native spatial formats like Dolby Atmos. The Lifestyle Ultra does a decent job of this, but it can best be described as conservative.

Playback of Dolby Atmos Music is really enjoyable, but Bose makes you work for it. There’s currently no way to stream Atmos Music to the Lifestyle Ultra via AirPlay 2 or Google Cast. Tidal, which has a very good Atmos library, won’t stream Atmos to the Ultra over Tidal Connect. This isn’t a Tidal limitation — you can stream Atmos over Tidal Connect to other devices like the Denon Home 600.

This means you’ll need a Dolby Atmos TV with Atmos-compatible streaming apps, or a third-party streaming device. I used an Apple TV 4K connected to an LG C7 OLED, with Apple Music, Tidal, and Amazon Music.

If there’s one thing I’d add to the Lifestyle Ultra, it’s a source-based memory for EQ settings. I found that movies really benefitted from a maxed-out bass level, and yet this proved too boomy for music listening. Even the addition of user-defined presets would be a plus. Right now, however, you may find you need to keep your smartphone handy. I frequently hit the Bose app to make adjustments, which somewhat defeats the app-less anti-Sonos benefit to Bose’s approach.

Is it really a Sonos alternative?

At $1,099, the Bose Lifestyle Ultra Soundbar and Sonos Arc Ultra, cost the same. Both support Dolby Atmos and AirPlay 2. Both offer a simple set up procedure and easy, app-based adjustments for sound and room correction. Both work as Amazon Alexa smart speakers if you choose to enable it.

The Lifestyle Ultra’s inclusion of Google Cast gives it an edge for folks who want to do all of their music management from a third-party streaming app, especially those who have Android phones (the only way Android users can get hi-res or lossless audio on a Sonos Arc Ultra is to use the Sonos app).

And, I have to give Bose props for its design — the Lifestyle Ultra Soundbar looks pretty great.

However, when it comes to sound quality, the Arc Ultra is still better overall. Its internal subwoofer is nothing short of astonishing, creating a deeper, more visceral experience for movies. I find it so effective, I’ve taken to keeping my Sonos Sub switched off for much of our TV watching.

This also helps with music, lending both stereo and Atmos content an anchoring resonance the Lifestyle Ultra can’t quite match.

Bose gets the nod for dialogue clarity on the strength of its SpeechClarity setting. The Arc Ultra is very good for dialogue — no complaints at all — however, the Lifestyle Ultra can achieve a higher level of separation between voices and background, which some buyers will really appreciate.

In terms of flexibility, even if you decide to never use the Sonos app, the Arc Ultra is a better choice for those who want to expand over time. The Arc Ultra can be used with any matched set of Sonos’ non-portable speakers as surrounds, and you get a choice of two different subwoofers depending on your room size.

You can also share TV sound from Arc Ultra to any other Sonos speaker in your home, plus it’s compatible with Sonos’ Ace headphones.

Currently, only the Bose Lifestyle Ultra Speakers work as surrounds for the Lifestyle Ultra Soundbar, and your two sub choices (the Lifestyle Ultra Subwoofer and Bose Bass Module 700) are effectively identical, save for the fact that the Module 700 requires a wired connection to the Lifestyle Ultra Soundbar.

Sound from the Lifestyle Ultra Soundbar can’t be shared across your other wireless Bose products, and perhaps most surprising, given Bose’s history of supporting private listening via headphones, you can’t connect any Bluetooth headphones, and the Lifestyle Ultra Soundbar doesn’t currently work with Bose’s clever Personal Surround Sound feature.

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