Sonos Playbase is fashionably late to the sound base party
Sonos is known for innovation in multiroom audio, but can the company save the flailing sound base category with its newest product, the Playbase?
- Ty was nominated for Best New Journalist at the Australian IT Journalism awards, but he has only ever won one thing. As a youth, he was awarded a free session for the photography studio at a local supermarket.
It's been 18 months since Sonos' last product and today we finally get a look at what the company has been working on this whole time: the Playbase TV speaker.
The Playbase is Sonos' second home theater component after the Playbar (which remains in the lineup) and it's designed for people who don't want to wall-mount their TVs . Like Yamaha's sound projectors, the Playbase is designed to bounce sound off the walls to give you a room-filling sound.
Sonos actually started working on the Playbase in 2013, just as the sound base concept was gaining in popularity. Sound bases are speakers designed for a TV with a centralized base to be placed on top of them. However, recent changes to TV designs -- namely that stand legs are usually placed at each end instead of in the middle -- have meant that the sound base category has faltered to some degree.
Sonos isn't concerned by these developments, however, as it says the 2.28-inch (58mm) high Playbase will fit under many of the new-style TVs. Its top plate is designed to hold televisions up to 75 pounds (34 kilograms).
The Playbase includes six midrange drivers, three tweeters and a woofer feeding a bass port which the company calls the S-tube. This port snakes through the chassis giving the unit its weighty bass response while also passively cooling the components inside. (And yes, Sonos engineers told us they'd considered calling it the PlayBASS.)
The Playbase acts as a base for your TV. If your TV is old.
If you feel that the Playbase isn't giving you enough of the deep stuff the unit will connect wirelessly to the Sub, and you can complete the system with a pair of Sonos rears for a 5.1 surround setup if you wish.
Design-wise the Playbase resembles the latest Play:5 with the same control configuration and minimalist aesthetic. But the Playbase's grill is smarter than most -- it's designed to completely disguise the drivers inside while also bearing small holes still wide enough on one side of the device to exhaust bass -- which means no huge distracting hole.
While this is predominantly a home theater component, designed to make your TV sound better, the Playbase is also a Sonos. This means the Playbase uses Wi-Fi to stream music from dozens of services and network devices using Sonos' proprietary multiroom system. While Sonos was one of the first such systems it is no longer the last with competition from Bose's SoundTouch, DTS Play-Fi, Samsung Shape and Google's Chromecast Audio.
Based on what we heard, the Playbase has a huge sound reminiscent of other products like Mass Fidelity's The Core or Yamaha's YSP sound bars. The performance we heard wasn't quite "hi-fi" but it was a big, enjoyable sound you could dance to. Sonos' sound experience leader Giles Martin, who was present at the demo, described the sound as "phantom stereo". He explained that the device uses its multiple drivers to create a stereo effect, much in the same way as a stereo system creates a "phantom center".
The Sonos Playbase will be available on April 4 2017 for $699, £699 or AU$999. It will be available for preorder from today for pre-existing Sonos owners.
Will the Playbase re-energise the sound base category? While it's too early to tell, we look forward to testing the speaker in the CNET labs in the coming weeks.