Hi-res with Sonos S2

However Ferrari’s can be unreliable and accident prone in the hands of a premier league football player!

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There are many aspects of this. Unfortunately bits are not just bits - there’s all sorts of issues with SPDIF jitter, etc. Even the Wyred4Sound modded SONOS Connect, with the 96KHz/24bit upsampler inside, does not sound as good as many other solutions. See Darko.audio for comparisons and reviews.

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Hi @miguelito
My post was not about sound quality, I just wanted to point out that the ‘old’ Sonos hardware was already capable of 24 bit output and also makes use of it. It’s just the new Sonos S2 software which is now able to process 24 bit files, that’s all.

I have a stereo pair of the new 5’s I bet you can hear the difference on them.

You may be comparing different ‘master’ versions of the original file which will have been re-mastered (manipulated) to produce a different sound, and which can sound very different irrespective of the quality of the streamer/DAC.

I would be extremely surprised if you could hear the difference when 16 bit and 24 bit versions of the same ‘master’ are compared. These differences can sometimes be very subtle and difficult to distinguish even on on relatively ‘good’ music replay systems, let alone Sonos.

Still no way Roon streaming 24 bits to Sonos instead of 16. Hope to get this soon. Thanks Roon!

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I would read reviews of the port before buying one especially considering it’s ridiculous price. There are quite a reviews saying it has poor sound quality

Still I’d like to get rid of the transition from 24 to 16 you see in so many songs playing for Tidal/Roon.

One thing I will say is my SONOS speakers sound BETTER playing from Roon than any other source, including SONOS itself (ie playing a Music Library). My collection of SONOS includes: Playbar+Sub+2xOnes, 3xConnect:Amp, 2xConnect, 1xPort, 1xAmp, 2xSonos Play 1. All are on S2.

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Just curious. How many zones can you group together before it fails?

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Interesting question…

I have been able to play to 7 grouped zones. I have a total of 9 in one home. I presume playing them all would be fine.

I think/expect zone grouping connects to SONOS and makes the groups there. You can see that in the SONOS app when you group and play in Roon. But that integration is not completely in sync. I think the speakers and/or groups you select group/ungroup when you hit play, not before, and if you ungrouped all speakers in Roon, the groups in SONOS remain until you play to a specific speaker from Roon. I would like this integration to be tighter, not just at play time.

As for how SONOS deals with groups, my understanding is it picks one master (randomly?) and then the grouping works within the SONOS network, SONOS syncing up all speakers in the group, NOT Roon.

In summary, the grouping distribution is left to SONOS to deal with, Roon ends up playing to the master of that group. That is what I gather from this setup.

The choice of master is a bit of a mystery to me. I wish I could tell SONOS to prioritize masters that I know are hard-wired to ethernet, but I am pretty sure it does not. The one exception is when you have speakers set up as home theater: in that case the master is always the playbar-style speaker.

For peace of mind, I think I will start Roon playing to the zone I want to be master, then create the group. This way I think that zone will remain master.

If someone has better information, I would very much like to know more details.

Just running all 9 zones right now from Roon. Sounds great and SO FAR has not dropped at all.

Interesting. So I’m clear, your setting up the groups in Roon?

What is your Roon Core? I have a Nucleus + and use Auralic as endpoints. Nucleus specs suggest 6 zones max and the processing power of the Nucleus is way faster than Sonos.

Yes. And once a group starts playing, it shows the same in the SONOS app.

In this summer house (where I have 9 zones), and old 2009 mac mini, but with very little installed in it.

Couple of things:
1- Why limited to 6 zones? Where did you get this spec from?
2- Unclear to me it matters at all - I think the multizone is handled natively by SONOS, not Roon (I might be wrong here)

From Roon:

If Sonos is actually doing the grouping (processing) then it wouldn’t matter to you. That’s a lot of processing and network traffic to keep 9 zones all in sync. I suspect that’s why Sonos keeps the sample rate/bit depth small.

All of my Aries endpoints are hardwired to a full duplex Gigabit network with enterprise routing/switching. The Nucleus is the only thing I’ve found that can pull off that many zones with Library files/Tidal…FLAC/DSD/MQA etc. I’m kinda in the industry and usually only set up clients with Sonos or Savant.

For a lot of nerdy data about your Sonos mesh, go to

http://192.168.1.15:1400/support/review 

(replace the IP address with one of your Sonos units, but you need the port number and path)

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My assessment that Roon playback sounds better than SONOS playback holds even if it is just one zone playing. I don’t know. why but I presume SONOS might be doing some compressing that is not used by Roon. And I have set SONOS to “Uncompressed” music.

THAT-IS-FANTASTIC… Very interesting.

Pretty sure that SONOS is doing the group distribution and syncing - when you open the SONOS app you see the same grouping and what it is playing.

Miguel when you group in Roon, at least for me it groups in Sonos as well, so I think you are correct there. I did try playing a 24bit album on mu Sonos the other day (2018 by Mogwai) and it played in 24 bit with no down sampling and it made me really happy. I went straight to Roon hoping that the same would happen on Roon, but it downmapled to 16 bit, so I am looking forward to it not doing that, at least on the Amp and newer stuff which is where it makes sense.

I was having a number of problems with dropouts a while ago and ended up taking my Boost out and plugging in my Amp which is right next to the router and plugging in a couple of Sonos into my Orbi Mesh and it has been so much better since then across the house.

Regards

mike