“As a noted sage and seer of futurology, I predicted a couple of years ago, that shopping for furniture and clothes on the web would never take off. The internet clearly had a future for selling anything you can get through a letterbox – books, CDs, and so on – but who in their right mind would ever want to buy clothes without trying them on? Or order a sofa without first sitting on it?

Like those drug tests where research report excellent therapeutic effects for their new product apart from the small snag of death of the patient as a side effect, I was right in theory on both counts about internet shopping, but embarrassingly wrong in practice.

What I had forgotten, of course, was the magic wrought in the marketplace by price advantage. I still can’t quite accept that the web is the perfect medium to shop for furniture. But when enterprising, mould breaking companies such as the London-based Europe by Net, suppliers of large amounts of trendy European furniture (including this audible sofa from Italy, of which more in a moment), are able to offer it at 40 percent (and more) below the price charged by stores, even well-heeled buyers sit up and take notice. There’s a well-known saying (that I just made up) which says nobody ever got rich by buying retail.

Another small point about canny internet buyers, before I enlighten you about the audible sofa: what’s to stop a naughty, devious purchaser from fingering and jumping up and down on a piece of furniture in a shop before ordering it at a much lower price from the likes of EbN? The answer, of course, is nada.

Which is how I came to be viewing and listening to the Philippe Starck (yes, him again) audible sofa in a too-cool-to-care-less, snootier-than-thou London store, even though EbN had offered to airlift me to Milan to see it at manufacturer Cassina’s place. Who needs a day trip to Milan, after all, when you can waste the time of a regular retailer selling at some eye-watering mark-up to subsidize its dizzy West End overheads?

So anyway, the audible sofa – or, to give this impressively squidgy thing some of its several correctly poncy names, the MISS (Music Image Sofa System), the multi-sensory audiovisual chaise longue and sofa system, or, as the Italian manufacturer calls it, “Il Divano Audiovisivo Sensuale” – is, you could say, an expensively upholstered and exceptionally comfortable wooden box. It’s the generic term for a range of sofas, divans and corner units built in such a way, and with just the right cutout sections, that you can install a heavyweight sound system complete with subwoofers discretely inside it. The particular piece EbN has selected for the front of its virtual shop is this divan/chaise longue, but there is a variety of other configurations.

For 21st century couch potatoes, the MISS confers two distinct benefits. Fits, with good lumpy subwoofers bolted in among your sofa stuffing, you don’t just hear everything from your entertainment system more vividly – you feel every rumbly bit in your very bowel. Second, there’s what certain sexist people in my field (but obviously not me) call WAF – Wife Acceptance Factor.

The way women fail to understand the delight of loudspeakers the size of apartment buildings and cable trailing across the floor is something guys will never understand. A sofa with built in speakers and woofers seems a bit of a bachelor lifestyle accessory, but if you think about it, it’s also quite female friendly – look dear, no wires! Maybe that’s why it’s called MISS?