Roon shows all of my Sonos speakers twice – once “via Sonos Streaming” and once “via Airplay.”
Does it matter which one I choose? Is there any advantage to choosing one over the other?
Others may have a more informed view about audio quality but in my experience the main difference is that you can only group speakers of the same type together
So if you have 100% Sonos speakers - it probably doesn’t matter
If you have mixed speakers and want to group them - maybe airplay is a better bet
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Sonos streaming uses the sonos api and airplay uses airplay api. I don’t know the pros and cons of that.
For me there was a big difference: When using the Sonos protocol, I had a lot of skipping and drop-out problems with my Sonos Port. With AirPlay they are gone for good. Additionally, the Sonos App now shows title information and cover art instead of „roon-xyz.flac“.
I cannot hear any difference between the two.
The only „issue“ is a 1-2 seconds lag when starting to play.
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Whoa!! Thank you for sharing this. I also experience lots of dropouts with Roon and Sonos- most often when a new song starts, one speaker will work fine and the other will be silent for a minute before picking up the signal. Also nice to know that Airplay broadcasts the name - thats super cool. I’ll give it a shot and report back how it goes.
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I really hope it helps for you too. For me this was the switch from „frustrated“ to „absolutely happy with Roon“.
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Okay this is huge!! The next / previous track buttons in Sonos app on iOS actually work, and tell Roon to navigate to next or previous tracks. I had no idea it could do that! Wish I’d known all this a long time ago… but glad I have it now, and thank you again for sharing your experience here and prompting me to try Airplay.
One thing I’ve observed is that with this setup, you don’t use Roon to group speakers. Instead, you Airplay to a single Sonos speaker and then use Sonos to group them. This works just fine for me since I always want to play the same music through the whole house - I’m not playing different music in different rooms. It also makes the Roon volume slider actually useful, since it applies to all grouped speakers.
+1000 to that! Thank you.
Yeah! I’m glad I could help.
Interestingly I had only issues with my (LAN connected) Port. The other Sonos devices are all Play:3 (wireless Sonos Net) and they work without issues via Roons Sonos Protocol (they do not have AirPlay).
Cheers,
Stephan
I’m not sure about the quality. Qobuz now streams with Hi-Res 24-bit / 48 kHz. Airplay reaches a maximum of 16-bit / 44.1 kHz.
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I prefer Sonos streaming, but yeah, to this day this still applies…
Totally on board with you on preferring Sonos streaming sound, not sure what it was about the Airplay sound but I liked it less and could tell when it had been selected.
I always felt that Sonos streaming and Roon were more demanding of Network that Roon and Airplay.
I never got to the bottom of it from a reliability point, but I preferred Sonos streaming enough that I got my network working strongly enough that I had no dropouts or skip’s (or maybe a few a month)
I’m at my wits end with this, just can’t get it to play nicely all the time. Beam (+ 2 X SL’s + Sub) hardwired into router and four One’s and through Sonos App on PC I got no problems but with Roon it will “stutter” at the beginning of a song and then it’s fine or sometimes it will skip to the next track. Don’t know what to do to improve network and believe me, I’ve tried a lot of things! Any advice maybe?
Funnily enough I have just been through the same issue in a private thread, and after 3. Years of absolutely solid performance, it fell off a cliff and drop offs and disconnecting all over the place.
For some reason Sonos had decided to start routing my network traffic over my Play 3 (wireless) that is plugged into one of my Orbi Mesh devices (via Ethernet) that also happens to be connected to the same switch as my Roon Core.
Took me about 2 weeks to completely figure out and get back to normal. For some reason the Sonos decided that it was more efficient to route over wireless and took over the job, but being a Play 3 it only managed about 8Mb down and 5Mb up. After turning it off and everything working perfectly again I unplugged the Ethernet and was back to 800Mb up and down. There appears to be no way to turn this off over Ethernet as it is a feature not a bug 
The end result was I left that device in WiFi only mode and the problem 100% went away. I have no idea why it started doing this again after 3 years, but it could be worth trying some speed Tests in various places to see it they are reduced in speed.
Not sure if you’ve got the same issue, but hopefully a pointer in the right direction.
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I do have the same problems about the skipping and dropout with Sonos Streaming, no issues with Airplay 2.
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How did you figure this out?
I’m a Network engineer for my company as well as many other things.
I ended up working through each the issues with support and reporting back and as no one else had reported it during the beta they were not that interested in fixing it.
It almost always started with the device nearest my core so I unplugged that one and then slowly moved through them all one by one back to my Sonos Amp that was plugged into the router.
So I ended up unplugging everything and factory resetting the Amp and running it on WiFi only (not SonosNet) and then adding each device back in over several days also WiFi only and as well as giving them all reserved IP addresses on my Network.
That has been reliable ever since and the pain was gone.
This has worked for some but not for everyone.
Hope that helps
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