First look: Sonos Playbase delivers 'off the wall' sound

There’s a new Sonos speaker in town, and it wants to sit under your big-screen telly.

That’s the main difference between the Playbase and the Playbar: the Playbar is made for wall-mounting below similarly hung screens, while the Playbase is a slab which slides under the TV.

It’s solid enough to hold a 34kg TV, and as you’d expect from Sonos kit it sounds amazing.

Forget about your TV’s inbuilt and typically wimpy speakers, with their thin sound and poor reproduction of dialogue and low frequency effects.

The Playbase has a finely-tuned array of ten drivers – six mid-range, three tweeters and even a side-firing woofer – each with their own discrete amplifier, to produce a wide rich soundstage for your living room.

Think of it as a Sonos Playbar with even more oomph, despite being a slim 6cm high.

And like the Playbar, it hooks up to your TV with an optical digital-audio cable and taps into your home network over WiFi (although there’s also a network port, should you want a more hard-wired solution) for control via the Sonos smartphone app and listening to streaming music services such as Spotify.

Of course, you can mate the Playbase with a pair of Sonos speakers and the Sonos Sub for home theatre 5:1 surround-sound, although it’s a crying shame that Sonos still doesn’t support Dolby DTS.

The minimalist design is pure Sonos, with the Playbase available in black or white to match your living room decor.

The Sonos Playbase launches in Australia on April 4 at $999, with pre-orders now available for current Sonos owners.

David Flynn

David Flynn is the Editor-in-Chief of Executive Traveller and a bit of a travel tragic with a weakness for good coffee, shopping and lychee martinis.