Sonos’ new Ace headphones look great and reportedly sound great, too. But for the ultimate in sound quality, you might not want to resort to wireless headphones at all.

The Sonos Ace headphones are clearly built to take on Apple’s AirPods Max over-ear headphones, right down to their styling, which is – coincidentally, we’re sure – very similar to Apple’s headphones. I was expecting some kind of Wi-Fi connectivity with built-in apps, so you could use these for streaming at home without any other devices, just to stream music straight from the internet. But nope, they’re just another pair of fancy Bluetooth headphones, which makes us wonder: at this price, wouldn’t it be better to go wired? That depends.

“Wireless headphones can indeed be as good as or even better than wired headphones in terms of sound quality, but this often comes at a higher price due to the added cost of wireless technology, batteries, and extra features like noise cancellation and built-in smart assistants. For example, high-end models like the Sony WH-1000XM5 or the Bose Noise Cancelling Headphones 700 have received critical acclaim for their sound quality, often rivaling their wired counterparts,” Daisy co-founder and CEO Hagan Kappler told Lifewire via email.

To send digital audio over a relatively low-bandwidth Bluetooth connection, you have to compress the data before sending it and then decompress it at the other end. This takes time, and as a result, Bluetooth headphones never offer a latency-free (delay-free) connection, making them a poor choice for gamers or musicians who create music.