Sonos announces first new product since 2013: the Playbase

“Rarely will you find anything different on ARC than what’s on optical for any content, and it’s harder to route HDMI [ARC] cable”, explained Hilmar Lehnert, director of audio systems engineering. The Playbase can stream music wirelessly as well as provide a fuller sound to your TV. Inspired by the simple insight that up to 70 percent of all TVs stand on furniture and are not mounted to the wall, PLAYBASE is a thin, yet powerful speaker that sits discreetly under the TV.

Created to slide under your television rather than hang on the wall, Sonos’ new Playbase soundbar will be a good fit for many lounge rooms chasing better sound. This means that Playbar owners had a tough time setting up their systems accordingly. “When we think about what product we’ll invent next, we think first about the home, and the role each of our products play in the home”. This grille is made up of over 43,000 holes (apparently, we didn’t count) and like the Play:5, the Sonos tag also has very small holes drilled into it to ensure the sound isn’t compromised.

This drove the company to increase the design quotient of their speakers.

Sonos will begin selling the PLAYBASE on April 4, 2017.

Sonos actually started working on the Playbase in 2013 just as the sound base was gaining in popularity. This isn’t so much a successor as it is an alternative. And because of its28.4-inch width and 14.2-inch depth, Playbase fits between the feet and underneath the screens of the growing number of TVs that use separate left and right feet, instead of a single pedestal, to stand up on furniture, the executives said. The Sonos Sub does a great job of supporting the Playbase and shifting a lot more air, so that’s good if you want to rattle the room and annoy the neighbours.

The Playbase is a solid slab of matte black or white plastic that looks as minimalistic and innocuous as possible.

Sonos’s $699 2.28-inch-tall Playbase was created to fit unobtrusively beneath most top-selling TVs and on top of most pieces of furniture. That quickly gets expensive, however, and at a recent press gathering at the company’s Boston offices, Sonos was happy to demonstrate how good the Playbase performs on its own merits without the added components.

According to Sonos Sound Experience Engineer Greg McAllister, the Playbase has been in development for over three years. The PLAYBASE also has an optical audio input for your TV audio. Accordingly, you can connect to the internet via Ethernet or Wi-Fi.

The preceding press release was provided by a company unaffiliated with Dealerscope. In speaking with the Verge, Giles Martin (Sound Experience Lead at Sonos) even said himself that if someone already had a Playbar it wasn’t necessary to upgrade to the base.

Some disappointing points include the Playbase’s inability to support DTS multichannel audio. Unfortunately that does mean there’s no HDMI input, or indeed the ability to switch between multiple digital sources without unplugging and plugging them in manually.

On top of the innovations to the form factor, Sonos is also slowly adopting voice control and home automation by bringing Amazon Alexa support to the Sonos ecosystem later this year. CEO Patrick Spence recently told Variety that the company will also eventually make speakers with integrated microphones for voice control.