SONOS PLAYBASE Wireless Home Cinema Sound Base, Black

Product Information

The Sonos Playbase isn’t like most AV speakers, however. Yes, it’s designed to enhance the audio from your TV, just like any soundbar or soundbase product, but Sonos has also designed the unit to replace your living room hi-fi and integrate seamlessly with the rest of its family of multiroom speakers. But my TV has regular 02 HDMI and 01 HDMI ARC ports (I don’t want other audio outputs to use be cause of poor audio output quality) and TV has no optical output. Provide quality resources to improve the learning through play opportunities and experiences of children

Sonos' Playbar has been the soundbar/base to beat in terms of movie and music performance for the past few years, and the Playbase exceeds it in all areas.

The Sonos Playbase emerged on the scene before the Beam soundbar did, and it’s a different type of soundbar solution compared to the Beam. Simply put: In terms of sound quality and ease of use, the Sonos Playbase trounces every other soundbase we’ve tested thus far, and sounds better than many of the soundbars we’ve tested, though admittedly few of them run anywhere near the Playbase’s price range. As with the Sonos Playbar, the Playbase has just one audio input - optical. The idea is all your video sources run into your TV, and just the one optical cable (which is included) takes the sound from your TV and into the Playbase. If you want a Sonos speaker with an HDMI input, you need to look at the Beam. The BERG PlayBase comes as a simple tubular frame in two sizes, but the exciting part is that you get to choose which play accessories to combine with the base to build your own ideal climbing frame. Your family’s multi-functional climbing frame for play, sport, and relaxation is waiting for you! The Playbase and Playbar are practically inseparable when it comes to features, leaving the newer Beam to dominate when it comes to smarts.

The Playbase still has a number of strengths that haven’t yet been mentioned. The first is, unlike most soundbars and soundbases, it can be upgraded to a full 5.1 system with the addition of a Sonos Sub and two Sonos Play:1 (or even Play:3 or Play:5) speakers to act as the LFE, surround-left and surround-right channels.

Sign up

Before we got to testing, we ran Trueplay, Sonos’ auto-setup program which uses an iOS or Android device’s microphone to balance the output of multiple speakers and/or adjust the speakers’ EQ to work best with the room they are placed in. It’s not vital that the TV outputs Dolby Digital as a bitstream as the PlayBase can handle the default PCM signal, but the results are noticeably better when Dolby Digital is used. Another option is to use a third-party HDMI-to-optical converter such as this Flexson. If you're not bothered about Dolby Atmos, the choice between the Playbar and Playbase will largely be based on your needs – and availability. If you have your TV on a wall mount, then the Playbar makes more sense of the two. If your TV is on a stand, put it on a Playbase instead. There's little to do to physically connect the Playbase to your TV: plug the speaker into the wall and connect the digital optical audio cable to your display. The rest of setup happens in Sonos' app. While there are quite a few screens to run through, from connecting to Wi-Fi to detecting any other Sonos speakers you have, most people should have no problem getting the system set up. Assuming you do get the intended spacious sound, you’ll find it’s combined with bass that’s punchy, authoritative and energetic. The bass here is far more natural and tonally expressive than that of the Playbar, which feels as though it’s compensating hard for its diminutive chassis and sounds a little artificial as a result.