- The head of Sonos has more to share
- Says Sonos is committed to the headphone category
- However, car audio is not a top priority right now.
Sonos CEO Tom Conrad has been busy speaking to outlets like TechRadar about his plans for the high-end audio company going forward, and in a new interview he confirms Sonos’ continued commitment to one product category while lowering expectations in another.
Conrad spoke with Chris Welch at Bloomberg about how Sonos intends to follow up on the Sonos Ace headphones that launched in June 2024, and the CEO emphasized that his company remains “really excited” about new pairs of headphones in the future.
It seems like the Sonos Ace 2 headphones might not be far away then, but Conrad expressed some regret about how the original pair was positioned in the market and suggests that selling them to existing Sonos customers first might have been a better strategy.
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“I think Ace’s thesis at launch was that in a $5 billion or $6 billion category, we can make a pair of headphones that are as good or better than anything else on the market, and the opportunity is to go out and go toe-to-toe with Sony, Bose and Apple and win,” Conrad says.
‘Strategic power’
While it seems likely that more headphones are on the way, don’t expect any kind of car audio solution from Sonos in the near future. Sonos already has a partnership with Audi, but for now we won’t see much more than that; certainly nothing like Cadillac’s AKG Dolby Atmos system, for example.
“As soon as you’re in the car, there are a ton of new goalkeepers,” Conrad says. “I look for places where we have some strategic power, and I find that in the car it’s a little difficult to argue that we have a lot of strategic power.”
However, there is still a “small team” working on potential Sonos products for the car. “I would say that what we do in the automobile sector is a hobby,” explains the general director. “Let’s see what happens there.”
Aside from future speculation, there are actual new Sonos products on the market that you can go out and buy right now, which fall into the company’s core focus on wireless speakers: there’s an updated Play speaker with greater portability, as well as a cheaper version of the Era 100; We have all the details here.
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