Sonos has found neutral point in audio
world. Wireless technology and capability of transmitting music almost from any
sources – even cloud or local storage – have brought reasonable trust from
information technologist on it, but its simple installment is also draw popular
appeal. Obviously, it’s not significant at all if its system does not sound
well; luckily, Play:3, Play:5 and Sub of Sonos all are impressed with their
sound quality. $699 Playbar is the latest member of family, and with this
product Sonos is aiming right to home theater market. Is it suit to living
room? Let’s find out!
Sonos
has found neutral point in audio world.
Hardware and setup
Playbar is a beautiful piece of equipment
even though it is mitigated. For size of 3.35 x 35.43 x 5.51 inch (85 x 900 x
140mm), you will not be in any trouble when installing it under flat-screen TV.
Indeed, we used it with 42-inch and 47-inch television and realized that the dimensions
would match in both cases. Its exterior is covered by black speaker cloth going
with pewter-colored bars along two edges of speakers. Two brands inset
accurately surrounding mesh grills on each end – the resonance of design
language of Sub – together with Sonos standard-volumn switch, mute button, and
LED power light on the right. Long metal edges which are made of protruding
aluminum, and wider sides of two create room for installing series of IR
receiver and IR strip, along with V-shape cut on the underside for power port,
2 Ethernet jacks and Toslink port. Excellent construction quality – slots are
quite uniform and we cannot find any exterior shortcomings on our testing
model.
For
size of 3.35 x 35.43 x 5.51 inch (85 x 900 x 140mm), you will not be in any
trouble when installing it under flat-screen TV.
Besides supplying a bit beautiful contrast
and space for small Sonos logo, the bigger aluminum edge plays role of cooling
for nine drivers that create sound. There are six 8-centimeter aluminum cone
mins (3.15 inches) powered by neodymium magnets, and three 2.5-centimeter
titanium dome tweeters (1 inch), each speaker has a private digital amplifier.
The speakers are installed in a super rigid, sealed plastic casing at 45-degree
angle, and neutral point itself is the key for making good sound imaging, even
Playbar is mounted on the wall or lies flatly on TV cabinet. Of course,
accelerometer and PowerPC CPU 800MHz inside also work together in order to
identify the direction of Playbar and change EQ suitably to be sure that
imaging is perfect.
There
are six 8-centimeter aluminum cone mins (3.15 inches) powered by neodymium
magnets, and three 2.5-centimeter titanium dome tweeters (1 inch), each speaker
has a private digital amplifier.
It is not an outstanding industry design,
but it is more ostentatious than your normal soundbar. Let’s look at it
following that way: it will be fit perfectly in most of the decoration but
distinctive enough that astute visitors recognize and ask for it – or at least
that is our experience during testing it.
Sonos is proud of that company’s systems,
in fact, are easy to install, and Playbar is not exception. To check ease of
installation, we have asked one girl who is not good at technology to connect
Playbar and Sonos Bridge, and she could match them in less than 5 minutes. Just
plugs Toslink cable into Playbar, then connect the other end of cable with TC
or other audio sources, it’s finished.
After that, Playbar remind you to push
volume-up button on TV remote that allows it to find out appropriate IR code.
From that, your remote could control the volume on Playbar. In case that
Playbar could not identify remote right away, Sonos software can lead you
through typing volume switch and mute buttons in order that it is able to read
correctly code and add into list on sever of Sonos. By that way, the future
customers will not have to do these additional steps. That is just another
designing genuine from Sonos’ staff. Such simply acting is usually difficult to
carry out but researchers at Sonos have made connection of an IR remote really
easy.
Playbar
is a beautiful piece of equipment even though it is mitigated.
We had a little trouble trying to combine
Playbar and Bridge regardless of clear and easy-to-follow instructions of Sonos
Controller software. However, moving Bridge more far from router and quickly
resetting that router has dealt with this problem. Then you only push ‘join’
button on Bridge, ‘mute’ and ‘volume up’ buttons on Playbar so we have done in
short time. Whenever connected, it took about 10 minutes to index 40GB music
folder that we had on external hard ware linked through USB; during that time
we entered login information for streaming service. As a result, from opening
box to listening Blind Melon, we spent less than half an hour.
A quick note about our setup. We were
forced to connect Playbar directly with decoder box because optical output of
flat-screen TV didn’t open when set up to HDMI port. There was no capability of
pulling audio from any things playing on TV, so we had to swap connections
between PS3 and satellite-TV box if we would like simulated surround sound of
Sonos on it. That was obviously inconvenient, and the thing against easy-to-use
feature of Sonos. Of course, it is not a problem for those users who own such
TVs without any restrictions, but it is worth considering before spending
700USD on a Playbar.
