Sonos' headphones spotted online, could come sooner than we thought

Sonos has been working on its wireless headphones for a long time now, but after recent rumours suggested they wouldn't appear until this summer at the earliest, a new listing suggests they might not be so far off after all.

Without any product actually announced officially, the listings website of the Bluetooth group has been updated to include an entry for "Sonos wireless headphones", as spotted by 91mobiles. 

The listing has a model number, S49 (not that it'll mean much to the final product) and the headphones are apparently slated to use Bluetooth 5.4, pretty much the latest version of the tech.

It enables funky new features including Auracast (which lets nearby public announcements pipe directly into your headphones to avoid being lost in active noise-cancelling) and more reliable multipoint audio. 

There's little else to glean from the listing at this point, since it's entirely and exclusively focused on what type of Bluetooth the headphones will use, but it's another drop in the ocean of leaks and rumours about Sonos' personal audio plans. 

Last week we learned that the headphones, despite being clearly aimed at the premium market, won't go quite as gung-ho as trying to match the pricing of the expensive AirPods Max.

Instead, a heavily rumoured US price of $449 would translate to pretty much £359. This would obviously still make them a very pricy bit of kit, but only a little more expensive than flagships from the likes of Sony, Bose and Sennheiser.

If Sonos is indeed going to release one of the best sets of wireless headphones on the market at the first time of trying, that price will be justified, although there's a lot riding on that judgement. 

One thing is for sure – Sonos is striving to make the headphones work with Wi-Fi, something that few others can match. This would presumably enable some great feature tie-ins with its multiroom speakers and soundbars, but has apparently also been the source of some delays. 

It turns out that getting Wi-Fi antennas in the headphones without compromising on battery life and signal strength might have been quite a challenge. 

Although this Bluetooth listing suggests that things are getting closer than ever to a release date, we'll still have to wait for word from Sonos to find out anything official.