Designed to slide under your television rather than hang on the wall, Sonos' new Playbase soundbar will be a good fit for many lounge rooms chasing better sound.

While the new generation of super-thin televisions might look good, they tend to sound pretty average because the panel simply isn't thick enough to squeeze in decent speakers. Soundbars give your television extra oomph while also making it easier to hear the dialogue, but a soundbar's traditional long, skinny design means that one is unlikely to fit in your lounge room if your television sits on a cabinet rather than hanging on a wall.

Sonos took these hassles into account when designing its new $999 Playbase soundbar, which goes on sale April 4 and is available for pre-order today for existing Sonos owners. Instead of a long skinny bar, the Playbase is more of an oval shape. The idea is that your television sits on top of the Playbase, which can hold up to 35kg. This is perfect if your television lives on a cabinet where there's no space to sit a skinny soundbar in front of the television, or space to hang a soundbar below the television.

Some televisions have a foot at each end, rather than a single large foot in the middle, but the Playbase is only 5.8cm tall and 72cm wide so it should fit underneath this kind of a television, squeezing between the feet. It's available in black or white, to suit your decor.

Sonos still sells its $999 Playbar alongside the Playbase, offering soundbar solutions to suit every lounge room. While the Playbase isn't as wide as the Playbar it still matches its impressive sound quality with rich tones, strong bass and a wide sound stage. It's also designed to work in conjunction with the Sonos sub, plus you can use a pair of Sonos Play 1, 3 or 5 speaker as rears.

Sonos isn't the first soundbar maker to embrace this design, but it's great to have this option in the Sonos range – especially considering that it is blessed with the same multi-room audio capabilities as the rest of the Sonos range. It can stream music from your mobile devices or directly from subscription music services like Spotify, Apple Music and Google Play Music.

Rather than just bouncing sound off the walls, the Playbase uses phasing tricks to make it sound as if the soundbar is creating a sound stage much wider than the speaker itself. It put on a good show at Sonos' recent Australian demos – close your eyes and you'd swear the speaker was much wider than the television. Of cours it's not a single speaker, the Playbase contains six mid-range speakers, three tweeters and a sub-woofer. You can also use Sonos' Trueplay app to fine-tune the Playbase or Playbar to suit the acoustics of the room, and I'm looking forward to putting it through its paces in my lounge room.

In terms of connectors and format support the Playbase is identical to the Playbar, relying on your television to have a digital optical output to feed audio to the speaker. Unlike some soundbars, there's no HDMI passthrough for connecting your media players directly.

The Playbase and Playbar support Dolby Digital surround sound but not DTS, which is the default format on most Blu-ray discs. It takes 2-channel sound from DTS sources, which might be a deal breaker for some purists but won't bother others considering that streaming services like Netflix tend to favour Dolby.

Does your television eek out underwhelming sound? What have you done to improve the audio on movie night?