I currently have 2 Bluesound Pulse Flex speakers in kitchen and bedroom. My main listening room has a Nucleus that is core and endpoint via HDMI to a Denon AVR.
I’m looking to add speakers in 2 more rooms, one of which I would connect to a TV both as better sound for the TV but also to play music in that room.
I’m thinking about switching to Sonos because:
I’ve heard the Bluesound 2i series has some reliability issues with Roon.
The Bluesound soundbar is awfully expensive, especially given the possibility of it not working well as noted above.
The integration of Alexa with the new Sonos speakers will be appreciated by the rest if the family who refuse to use the current Bluesound speakers in favor of the Echo Dot.
It also looks like Sonos has an outdoor speaker the I could put on our deck/pool area.
One downside is the Sonos are not RAAT compatible, so no grouping with my main listening room.
Thoughts on Sonos? Are there other family friendly options that also support Roon which folks think are worth considering?
It’s hard to get more family friendly than an homepod if your family is part of the apple ecosystem. But your comment about alexa and the echo dot tells me that you are not an apple ecosystem, so I’d strike the apple products off the list. they do have reasonable sound quality (if you don’t stick them near a wall) and work well with roon (via airplay).
The B&W Foundation series speakers are Roon ready and worth considering. I don’t personally have them but I have a range of other B&W wired speakers that are excellent and would seriously consider them if I was in the market for wireless speakers.
I would not do Sonos given the reasons you articulated. Up until very recently I would not do wireless bluesound gear because they have had many issues. But these seem to be ok now with latest firmware updates.
Bluesound will allow up to 192k/24 bit support and support MQA (if you care) while the Formation support up to 96k/24 bit and don’t support MQA. The Apple homepods are limited to redbook music resolution and don’t do MQA so I’m pretty sure they can’t do HD.
The Sonos speakers are pretty good and I’ve not had issues running them with Roon. I have been very happy with the Beam and sub for my TV but I don’t use this setup to listen to music. Be aware that Sonos does not support high resolution tracks (96/24+).
Sure, but should you care? It’s a homepod, and contains like $3 in drivers. Given the sonic performance of the thing, redbook is plenty good for it. Not that I’m badmouthing the homepod, it does sound quite good compared to its competition, but redbook is also quite good when done properly.
I don’t understand the crazy obsession with high bitrate and mqa on this forum. Sure, it’s better but that doesn’t mean the good ol redbook audio is somehow not capable of conveying the music to your ears. I’ll take a great album in any format over some dreadful audiophile recording in hi-res.
Jeez. Chill out @Sheldon_Stokes. I made no qualitative judgements on anything except for Sonos which the OP specifically asked for. Other than that I provided 100% factual information on other wireless speakers which he also was looking for and may or may not help him in his selection. I said nothing negative on HomePod nor was I obsessing on high res.
Oh crap, sorry. I didn’t mean that to come off as confrontational. I’ve been watching people get worked up into a lather over MQA and such and it seems like we loose sight of the forrest for the trees.
Your points are good, and the biggest problem with the homepod is more one of it being an Apple gadget which will only work the apple way and support could be dropped for it at any time if it is not popular enough.
Again, sorry if I came off like I was ranting at you, I meant no offense.
All good @Sheldon_Stokes. Thanks for the post. And BTW I have a HomePod also and it sounds great but it’s like an orphan in my house because I can’t group it with anything else as all my other zones are RAAT… And personally I don’t care about MQA but didn’t know if the OP might…
I feel your pain and the Homepod being such a closed “appliance” leads me to believe that the only hope of pairing and grouping is via airplay2 and shairport-sync incorporating airplay2.
I make sure all my zones also are airplay capable (which they all are because Apple is the 10000lb gorilla in the music streaming world). So if I need to group, I do it via iTunes. For the same reason you mentioned.
I use a Bluesound Pulse 2 on the TV and Roon in the conservatory without any issue. It all just works, sounds great, does high res and MQA.
The optical input is set to sense a signal and turns on with the TV.
I used to use iTunes and had airport expresses feeding music wired to all my music zones so while I wasn’t wireless, I was still limited to airplay resolution. I broke away from this locked in ecosystem a couple of years ago and couldn’t be happier although I certainly understand the reasons for staying in the Apple fold. I have NAD CI720s which have bluesound embedded powering all my all my zones now except for my main listening room and they are great and they allow me to support up to 24 bit/192k res. Having said that I’m not a high res obsessive and a redbook cd from a great master mix will crush a high res or MQA file from a crappy master any day. But I did not want to have to force Roon to downsample tracks in high res just due to Apple limitations. And I was getting tired of the bloat in iTunes…
Thanks for the helpful information everyone! Wasn’t aware of the B&W option. Gonna check that out.
@Mark_Hellkamp, when you say the Sonos doesn’t support hi res, does that mean it won’t even play a 96/24 file, or that it’ll play but get down-sampled?
Any chance Amazon Echo devices will ever work as a Roon endpoint?