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Sonos Playbase review: The only speaker your living room needs
The idea of having high-quality home theater audio seems great until you actually try and set it up. I've owned a few surround sound systems, but the additional speakers and cables added a level of complexity that never felt worth it to me. So I've been languishing for years with mediocre audio coming from my built-in TV speakers. It doesn't sound great, but at least I have a clean setup that doesn't require extra hardware and a mess of cables. But the Sonos Playbase has me thinking that it's time to upgrade. This massive speaker, wide and flat like a pizza box, is designed to sit underneath your TV, and includes three distinct audio channels as well as a built-in subwoofer. Like all other Sonos products, it uses WiFi to connect to other speakers and lets you stream music from just about any service you can think of, but it also outputs all of your TV audio. Sure, it's not a full 5.1 setup, but a one-box, one-cord solution to upgrade my home theater seems like just what I need. Still, as with almost everything Sonos does, it doesn't come cheap: $700 in this case. For those who want better sound in their living room, the Playbase is a compelling option -- particularly if you're a music fan.
How Sonos made the new Playbase sound a lot better than it should
Amazon upended the home speaker space with the Echo, causing other companies to start figuring out voice control systems of their own. Sonos, which has made WiFi-enabled speakers for years, has repeatedly reassured customers that it, too, would eventually offer voice connectivity. And yet, somewhat surprisingly, Sonos' newest product has nothing to do with voice control. Instead, the company's first device since 2015's Play:5 speaker is its second attempt at simple, excellent home theater audio. Sonos already sells the Playbar, a wireless three-channel speaker meant to be mounted to the wall below your HDTV, but today it launched another product that does the same job in a completely different form factor. The $699 Playbase is a massive wide and narrow speaker that looks like a Play:5 after it's been run over by a steamroller.
