Sonos PLAYBAR Pro Reviews

It's expensive, but it looks gorgeous, sounds brilliant, can be extended into a 5.1 system and it can join your existing Sonos multi-room system

Sonos took its time creating the PLAYBAR, and that consideration shows both in how it sounds and how easy it is to setup and use. Certainly, at $699/£599/€699 it’s expensive when compared to a regular speaker-bar. You can find those for a couple of hundred, after all, though their audio performance may not match up to the PLAYBAR’s beautifully balanced sound. Still, you’re not just getting one product, but two: a speaker-bar for your TV and another zone in your Sonos system, certainly more than equivalent to a $399 PLAY:5.

The Playbar has its charms. It's well-designed and innovative, with great virtual surround effects that you can't get elsewhere without spending more. Sonos also has delivered on truly painless setup for both the sound bar and its digital music software, which is no small feat. But ultimately we can't love the Playbar because, well, we wouldn't want to listen to it every day. It sounds like no other sound bar and, since our tastes skew purist, its processed sound gets tiresome over time. It's easier to live with the Playbar for movies and TV, but for a sound bar that's so focused on music -- this is Sonos, after all -- we wanted it to sound a lot better with stereo music. Especially for $700. If you're invested in the Sonos ecosystem and aren't a purist about sound quality, the Playbar is a solid choice as a way to get better sound out of your TV. But for Sonos newcomers, the Playbar isn't a great entry point to the company's line, as it's less impressive as a standalone product.