Sonos has unveiled its Beam Ultra soundbar and Ace Ultra headphones in Australia, alongside the Sonos 27 operating system designed to make its products more intelligent and closely connected.

The $1,099 Beam Ultra retains the compact Beam format but adds nine custom drivers, including two dedicated upward-firing drivers, to deliver true 7.1.2-channel Dolby Atmos.

It also features warmer bass, a redesigned centre channel for clearer dialogue, four levels of AI Speech Enhancement and Night Sound for reducing disruptive volume peaks during late-night viewing.

Beam Ultra supports Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and HDMI eARC, while Trueplay adjusts its output to the room. It can be paired with a Sonos Sub and rear surrounds, including compatible portable speakers such as the Move 2 and Sonos Play.

Early demonstrations reportedly delivered clear dialogue, strong bass without a separate subwoofer and convincing spatial separation, although performance will depend heavily on room acoustics.

The $699 Ace Ultra headphones introduce a Sonos-designed 40mm driver, Adaptive ANC powered by 10 microphones and up to 35 hours of battery life with noise cancellation enabled. A three-minute charge provides three hours of playback.

As revealed last month following an FCC filing, the Ace Ultra’s major upgrade is full integration with the wider Sonos system, addressing arguably the biggest failure of the original headphones.

The filing pointed to infrastructure Wi-Fi that would allow the headphones to operate as a genuine Sonos endpoint.

Sonos has now confirmed that capability through its Headphone Engine 2 platform. Users can press a button to transfer audio from a nearby Sonos speaker to the headphones, then send it back without needing a phone in range.

The confirmed $699 Australian price is also significant. Previous leaked international pricing suggested Sonos could undercut the original model, despite concerns that rising memory costs could push the new model beyond $750. But Sonos has kept its Australian pricing level with the original Ace’s launch price.

TrueCinema can analyse the acoustics of a room through a compatible Sonos soundbar and tune the headphones’ spatial audio to recreate the home theatre experience. USB-C, 3.5mm and Bluetooth connectivity are also supported.

Sonos 27 adds portable-speaker surrounds, manual EQ controls and integration with external AI services including ChatGPT and Claude through Model Context Protocol.

Its upgraded voice assistant can also interpret conversational music requests, such as distinguishing between different artists’ versions of the same song.

The first Sonos 27 features begin rolling out from September 8. Beam Ultra and Ace Ultra are available to pre-order through JB Hi-Fi ahead of their Australian release on September 29.