If you’ve been following Sonos for a while, this may not come as a surprise. The Playbar name has been floating around since 2014, according to David Zatz of Zatz Not Funny, who spotted the Playbase in a retail listing on BH Photo, which has since been pulled down. That retail listing wasn’t the only place that the Playbase has been spotted either — it has also appeared in an FCC listing and a deleted post on the Sonos forums.
Judging by the name and images leaked on Twitter by Jon Maddox, the Playbase looks to be a more compact alternative to the Sonos Playbar, meant to sit underneath your TV rather than in front of it. This type of product is commonly known as a soundbase, with products like LG’s SoundPlate and the recently released Fluance AB40 also adopting this form factor.
Despite the leaks in various places, there still isn’t much to go on in terms of what features the Playbase will offer. It looks like there are no HDMI ports, with only an optical input, as is the case on the Playbar. Sonos told Digital Trends last year that it plans to support its TruePlay automatic calibration on all speakers going forward, so that will likely be supported out of the box.
While the product has yet to be officially confirmed by Sonos, the pulled retail listings point to a March release date, with both black and white models available for $700. If the product will indeed ship this soon, we would expect to see an official announcement from Sonos in the near future.
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