We are used to seeing television screens getting ever more impressive, transmitting crystal-clear images to our living rooms. The sound, however, is another thing.
In the past, only those with a home cinema could immerse themselves in a memorable sound experience. It was the preserve of the very wealthy – the sort of thing you might see in an old episode of MTV Cribs – or the most committed audiophile. But times are changing.
“I personally don’t subscribe to the term ‘audiophile’,” Hilmar Lehnert, director of audio systems engineering at Sonos, tells me from his office in Boston. “I think pretty much everyone on the planet enjoys good sound and good music. We saw a very significant need – an experience people can have at home – that wasn’t as accessible as it should be.” This is the task that engineers at Sonos sought to solve, first with their Playbar, released in 2013, and now with Playbase, a thin powerful speaker designed to fit under your TV.
There are many beautiful televisions on the market, but most only use small internal speakers, Lehnert says. A particularly slim TV leaves very little of the space required for any complex sound system. The sound “can’t come close to matching the picture”, he says.
Furthermore, many people will be familiar with dealing with a morass of cables and remote controls as they attempt to navigate TVs, speakers, laptops, phones and various other devices, whether in an effort to match the sounds to the picture, or merely listen to a favourite playlist. “You had to structure your living environment to adapt to that,” says Lehnert, “making a trade-off between how comfy you are in a place, and how good a sound experience you can get.”
Sonos’s simple goal was to make this experience better, which is where the science of sound comes in. “You need space to create good sound. You need a radiating surface area for acoustic volume,” Lehnert says. The Playbase, a 72cm-wide soundbase – ideal for a television to perch on – provides that space.
While the team were developing the newest addition to the Sonos home sound system, they visited Hollywood to meet industry experts, listening to movie soundtracks that had just been mixed to see how they sounded on the Playbase. They included sound engineer Chris Jenkins, who won his third Oscar for 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road. They also went through the grisly western, The Revenant, scene by scene with its sound mixer Jon Taylor to perfect the audio experience.
To perfect the sound required serious thinking about the differing needs of music, film and TV. “We do individual tunings for music and video,” Lehnert says, although the main objective for both is for it to sound natural. “In movies, often interesting things happen – there’s a scene in the woods, say, and it goes ‘crack’ over here and birds are chirping over there,” he says. “There are discrete, spatially isolated events. We are more aggressive in making them more spacious on video – placing auditory objects way outside your field of vision – than we are with music. For music we’re aiming more for a very continuous, clean soundstage.”
Key to all of this is how the soundbase works in a room. “The science is pretty straightforward, although easier said than done,” says Lehnert. There are multiple drivers in a Playbase unit, which are combined with different radiations and advanced software that is not dissimilar to radar. “With radar,” he says, “you can steer a beam in a certain direction primarily with software using multiple sensors. And we do the same thing. We can figure out that this object needs to be over there, so we send a sound beam over to the side and, with any luck, it bounces off a wall enough to become audible in the right way.”
The sound is more room dependent than previous devices, but the engineers have tested it in spaces of various size, and in different homes, to ensure it provides quality sound in all situations. However, Lehnert cautions, where you place the soundbase within a room matters. He recalls encountering a Playbase in a shelving unit with the door closed – which is clearly not ideal. In general, the best position is somewhere roughly halfway between two walls, as this tends to be preferable to a corner placement.
Regardless of the space or placement, the Playbase can be calibrated with Trueplay tuning, which uses the Sonos app and the internal microphone on any iOS-enabled device to measure how sound reflects off walls, furniture and other surfaces in a room and makes precise acoustic adjustments to optimise the sound of your speakers.
Another area where the Playbase stands out – and there might be a clue here in the title – is in the deep bass. This came with “a lot of blood sweat and tears”, says Lehnert, and involved Sonos’ engineers designing a sizeable woofer from scratch while doing extensive computer modelling to get the desired rich bass sounds.
The multisensory overload of Mad Max: Fury Road is one that particularly stands out when using the Playbase, Lehnert says. An example of a song that displays the full sonic potential of the device is Everything in its Right Place, the opening song of Radiohead’s acclaimed 2000 album Kid A. The track is a melange of electronics, organs and vocals floating on top of each other: “It’s very continuous, very room-filling,” says Lehnert. They used it a lot in the Playbase demo process. “I just like to close my eyes and experience it. I don’t hear the speaker any more, I just hear the music.”
And this, perhaps, is the ultimate aim for Lehnert and the engineers at Sonos: “Our mission is to render the artist’s intent,” he says. “For us, music or film is between the artist and the audience. The speaker is a means to an end, but not the end in itself. Something that emotionally captures you with the least amount of rigmarole as possible is what we want.”
