Quick Review: Sonos Playbar 

Thanks to my wonderful future in-laws, we found ourselves in possession of a really awesome Sonos Playbar. In our new living room, we had been using the TV speakers of our new Samsung HDTV for our audio, whether via the TV or when playing music via the Apple TV or Pandora on the TV.

It was fine. Or maybe slightly less than fine. Not nearly as good as the surround sound setup we had in our condo (which isn’t a good fit for our living room). Certainly not good enough to use to play music while making food in the kitchen, or having a little party on the first floor.

We had jokingly asked for a Playbar, mostly since I had convinced myself that I would get one for myself for my birthday. Well, Merry Christmas, we got one six months early.

Let’s start with the handful of cons:

• The price. It’s expensive. It’s really nice, but that doesn’t make it not expensive.
• It doesn’t come with a mount. I was sort of astounding it doesn’t come with a mount. Now, the mount isn’t all that expensive, but for what you pay, you’d expect that to be included.
• No Apple Airplay support. It’d be awesome if it acted as an Airplay receiver so you could throw any old iOS/Mac audio right at it without having to turn on the Apple TV.

There are a lot of pros:

• Integrated apps. For things like Pandora, or SiriusXM, or Amazon music, or Spotify, you just plug in your info and then you can manage the thing via the Sonos app. And it works quite well. You can control it from almost anywhere in the house.
• The sound. It sounds great. Really great. Much better than TV speakers, and good enough that I’m not sure we’ll rush to add surround sound to our living room. It’s been great watching movies and Netflix and listening to music.
• It looks good. Our TV is mounted on a corner mount, so mounting the Sonos wasn’t easy. I had to buy a soundbar mount that mounts to the TV mount, and then mount the Sonos mount to it. It took a bit of work to get it working, and I think we nearly dropped our TV, but in the end, it looks really nice mounted right below the TV.
• It’s expandable. We like the Sonos enough that I may get another speaker (like a Play:1) and be able to control them all simultaneously.

For the Sonos, you’re paying a premium, and there’s not a lot of discounts available. So you need to really want one (or have some really nice family members). But, so far, it feels like it’s been worth the money.