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The ace headphones are too loud no matter the volume setting. I know this has been mentioned in several other threads, but I wanted to raise it again in a new ticket because it hasn’t been addressed by staff in months and it falls under the very basics of implementing a set of headphones. I’m also the very specific type of person who wants to test a hypothesis, so I have some debugging information that might be helpful to the engineers. My Ace headphones started to correctly report their dB levels to iOS’s headphone safety widgets, so I was able to compare the linear 0-100 volume setting with the reported headphone decibels when playing a steady white noise track. I did this across three headphones: the Ace, Bose QuietComfort 45 II, and Beats Powerbeats Pro earbuds. The latter was included as a reference because Apple’s documentation said the dB reporting feature was most accurate on Beats and Apple products. I’ve included the table of values below, stopping at 50 because the Ace were already nearing volumes too loud for everyday listening. 

We can see that the Bose and the Beats largely translated a given volume setting to the same decibel level, plus or minus a few dB. Meanwhile, the Ace were incapable of going lower than 54 dB; the sound cut out entirely at 1. My hunch that started this investigation was that maybe there was an issue using a log scale instead of linear or vice versa at some point. The upper right scatter plot does suggest the lower volume region is intended to be interpreted logarithmically, but is treated as a linear scale by the Ace.

One other tiny bug I found, that likely impacts no one, is a disagreement between the volume number reported in the Sonos app and the system volume. I was using Siri to dial in specific levels for the non-Sonos headphones, and the bar in the Sonos app was always off by one. I’m wondering if there’s not a mix up in 0 versus 1-indexing in the way it’s using the API. Like I said, this one shouldn’t have a material impact, but it explains why a volume of 1 in the app had no sound, and it suggests that the Sonos side of things may not be adhering to the API definitions set forth by the system, resulting in the disagreement in volume levels. 

I really hope this helps! I love the way the headphones sound, and the build quality is great. I just want to finally be able to play things quietly.

Hi ​@RightChuffed

Thanks for the information and your diagrams. This has been raised a few times already as you’re aware and I and the other moderators have flagged this with the team for further testing. Currently no issue has been raised as of yet, so with no information to share, that’ll be why you haven’t seen any updates from us about this.

Your thread has been forwarded to the engineers and we’ve made a list of all threads and comments regarding the Sonos Ace being too loud. If we have anything to share, we’ll update the relevant threads.


Thank you RightChuffed for your testing and post. I was wondering was it just me, but I have noticed that my ears have just felt tad weird (sensitive?) after watching movies for hour or two with Ace headphones. Never had any such issues with multiple different Sennheiser, Grado and Audio Technica headphones and earbuds, so wondering if what you’ve reported here might be the culprit in my case as well. 🤔

In any case, good that Sonos engineers are looking into this. 👍🏻


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