Unboxing the Sonos Playbar

Hi Dave Johnson editor of eHow Tech and I have got a really cool gadget that’s for music lovers who have probably a somewhat a bigger budget. This is the Sonos Playbar, it’s ginormous, it costs $700 but before I open it let me make sure that we all understand what Sonos is all about because Sonos actually is one of my favorite things in all the world, it’s a sound system for your home. It connects to your PC, that all your music is stored on and you can put a Sonos box in each room of your house if you want to, from my phone or from my PC I can choose what music to play and it grabs music from my computer and also from the internet. So what is this thing? What’s the playbar? Well it is a Sonos unit so you can put it in a room and it will play music through the speakers here, but it’s also a sound bar that’s designed for your TV. So let’s open the box up and see what’s in here. Here is the unit itself so let me just set that aside for a moment, the user guide, power cord, there are only two kinds of cables that you need for this – so there is a digital optical cable and this connects from the speaker to your television and there’s an Ethernet cable which you may or may not need so we’ll just set this aside for the moment. Now this is really really pretty, it has nine speakers, it has three tweeters and six mid-rangers, you can see there’s speakers on the ends and speakers through the body. And if I flip it around to the back there’s a power port, this is where the audio goes to connect to your television, and then two Ethernet ports and you only need this if you don’t have any other Sonos units. Because remember this is part of a system so you can have as many Sonos units through the house, but if this is the first Sonos unit you’ve ever purchased then you’ll need to connect this directly to your wireless router. If you already have a Sonos unit then you don’t need this. So let’s get this all set up and see how we can get music out of it. Okay so we’ve got the playbar hooked up and it was actually really easy to do, I just plugged it in to the wall to get power, and then the audio cable gets plugged into the back of the Sonos the other end goes into your television. So we’ve got our Sonos configured, we clicked through a couple dialogue boxes that set up the speaker, got it to talk to the rest of the Sonos network. And now we get the Sonos app itself, this is what we see in Windows, for example, we just click play and it’s going to start playing some song on my PC. So that’s pretty much Sonos in a nutshell, the playbar, it’s a little expensive at $699 but it gives you really high quality audio for your television and it’s yet another Sonos zone if you happen to have you know Sonos in your house already so I highly recommend it.