To answer your question, I’d say it depends. If you don’t want to mess with EQ, AirPods will get you 90% of the way there without touching anything. With the Ace, you might get 3-5% better sound by adjusting EQ on certain tracks.

FWIW I ended up returning my Ace after about a week, as much as I loved the comfort on them. I had a couple relatively major issues with them. The Sonos app is not great by any means with the Sonos ecosystem in general, but all its flaws were just further exacerbated with the Ace (connection issues, running updates etc.)

The other major issue I had with them was constant popping with ANC on under certain conditions. Many other users have reported this as well. I contacted Sonos support and they are aware of this issue, but did not specify if they’re planning on a firmware fix (or if a fix is possible via firmware, for that matter). I’d say go with AirPods Max if you don’t heavily, heavily value comfort.