Back in 2002 Sonos set out to change the way people listened to music. They wanted to make it a brilliant experience, something that could be experienced in any room. And they wanted to make it incredibly easy to play the music you love and to find new music to fall in love with.
Well, in a little over 10 years Sonos have had a massive impact on the home audio market and their PLAYBAR is a great example of how they are achieving their goals of changing the way we experience music, one home at a time.
Put simply, the Sonos PLAYBAR is a speaker that plugs into your flat screen TV to improve the quality of the sound. As we’ve highlighted before, as TVs get thinner and thinner the quality of the sound has dropped – so that is where sound bars like the Sonos and the Bose SOLO come in.
(Note: both Sonos and Bose seem to be fond of CAPITAL letters.)
But this Sonos PLAYBAR delivers much more than just hi fidelity Dolby digital sound through its 9 speaker rack.
First up, it is indeed very easy to install. You can fit it above or below a wall mounted flat screen or just place it on the stand your TV is on. It comes with just two cables – a power cable and an optical cable that plugs into the back of the TV.
When its plugged in – anything that is plugged into the TV will play through your Sonos PLAYBAR. Xbox, Blu-ray, DVD…anything.
Sonos claim that the PLAYBAR gives you access to “every song on the earth” – and that’s a pretty fair claim when you consider that you can stream music wirelessly to it from say, your iTunes library. But you can also stream from all of the major online music services like Spotify, last.fm and Pandora. All of which you can control by downloading free Sonos apps for Android, iPhone and iPad.
In fact, you don’t actually have to have a TV to use the PLAYBAR because it works as a standalone speaker should you want it to.
If you’re lucky enough to have other Sonos speakers around the house it will sync with them so you’ll be able to play music in any room you want.
If this amazing full theatre sound is not enough then go mad and pair it up with Sonos SUB for 3:1 bass that will have your house pounding with sound and even add Sonos PLAY:3 to the PLAYBAR and SUB to create the full on surround sound experience.
Sonos SUB and PLAY:3 both connect at the push of a button so again set up in simple.
Looking back to their goals in 2002, Sonos certainly appear to be ticking the boxes on all of them. They have successfully created an audio system that is easy to set up, controllable from your smartphone and capable of connecting you to any song, anywhere in the world whilst allowing you to play music in any room that has a Sonos speaker.
Oh and did we mention, the kit looks gorgeous and they’ve got Deadmau5 in their promo videos eating a large piece of cheese in his trademark and slight scarey mouse head.
Does it get any better? Take a look at the Sonos PLAYBAR video by clicking here.
(Gerald Giles, Norwich are authorised Sonos retailers. Come in or contact us to find out how you can transform your living room into a home cinema).