Connect no longer bit-perfect?

It depends what you mean by 'better job'. Most media players which support normalisation tags offer three options: album gain, track gain or OFF. In the first two cases they obviously depend on the user (or service) having tagged appropriately.

The track gain figure adjusts the level based on the average track loudness. The album gain figure is based on the average album loudness. By definition that figure is the same for all the tracks in the album.

Tools which add gain tags traditionally also add peak tags, representing the largest sample in the track or album. The media player can use this to avoid applying too much gain and going into clipping. Sonos ignores the track peak figure; another reason why the implementation is rather half-baked.

I haven't said that I hear a difference related to the DSP. I initially heard a difference between the Connect digital and analog outputs through a new Peachtree amp that has both inputs. It was only when making measurements related to this that I discovered the Connect DSP problems. This DSP is applied to ALL Sonos units as far as I know, so you won't hear a difference between them related to this.

The Sonos compressor only affects volumes within 3.6dB of the maximum (greater than 66% of full scale), cutting out below this. The volume reduction ratio gradually increases above -3.6dB, and eventually becomes a brick wall, not letting any signal exceed 90% (-1dB less) of the original. It also has a zero attack and decay time. A brick wall compressor with no attack/decay ramp is a bit extreme. This may or may not be audible, but at the very least we should be able to disable it in fixed volume mode.

I'm totally with you on the normalisation issue.

Cheers, Peter.

It was only when making measurements related to this that I discovered the Connect DSP problems. This DSP is applied to ALL Sonos units as far as I know, so you won't hear a difference between them related to this.


I have the Connect in just one of five zones; the rest are play units/Connect Amp driven, where the bits are an internal matter to the units, irrelevant to the user and not measurable. Rightly so, IMO, because all that matters is - how does the music sound on its own and compared to that from other solutions out there? And here I find Sonos beyond Connect can still be as good as it gets to my ears, where rooms sizes aren't outliers, being so large as to need a lot more power/sound levels than what Sonos can deliver.

But perceived sound quality noticeably fluctuates with sound level differences which is why I think normalisation is very important in an environment where mixed source playlists are in use; my solution so far has been to not make/use such playlists. Neither Sonos or anyone else seems to think this is an issue, given the lack of any progress on this front. One day perhaps, once they are bored of devoting resources to controller cosmetic changes!

I wouldn't call the recent controller changes cosmetic - they degrade the user experience.
Quite possible; I just learn to take things in my stride each time things change.

Here is the thing: once things are settled, even with some imperfections, cosmetic changes for no reason other than a change always run the risk of upsetting things that have worked well in the past. In trying to win over some preferences, others are lost. Stability would be far more useful to those that aren't easily bored; workarounds can then become habits for the little issues. But that isn't the way of the world in these areas now, constant churn seems to be the thing.

Not as small as you suggest. It is part of The Lenbrook Group, owner of The NAD Electronics and PSB Speakers brands.

That doesn't mean that Bluesound itself is a large company, or that they have a lot of customers.

It's a private company so information is difficult to find on it, but from some research it seems they have less than 30 employees and revenue of a few million dollars, which equates to less than 10,000 units sold. That is approximately where Sonos was as a company back in 2005.

Based on these figures, they are a company firmly in start-up mode.

Cheers,

Keith

As to competitors, I actually think Google are the biggest threat to Sonos today. Amazon seem to be more advanced with their development and partnerships of their Alexa voice interface, but Google have casting/streaming of both audio and video, which Amazon do not, and (IMO) Google's media services are also better than Amazon's.

So I guess the trick Sonos has to pull off is of the kind they have with streaming services - of being agnostic to which service is being used.

One should be able to use Sonos with either Amazon/Alexa, or with Google/equivalent.

Agreed. I also think Sonos also need to consider extending the casting solution they implemented as part of the Google Play Music integration far wider, at least on Android devices, with the aim of achieving parity with Google Cast.

Just so I understand - will this mean that any native app in use on an Android device, that allows casting will play on Sonos speakers, controlled via the native app?

Essentially, yes, although there may be some restrictions.

For instance, Google Cast does not allow casting from the Youtube app to the Chromecast Audio, but does allow casting of AV to standard Chromecast. I'm not sure if this restriction is a specific limitation that Google has encoded into the Youtube app or whether there's a generic audio framework thing which allows audio devices to be categorised in some way. I'm also not sure if there are any legal/licence restrictions on this.

Also, it's important to consider there's two types of casting: pull and push.

Apple's airplay seems to exclusively use push casting, where the audio/video being cast traverses the device initiating the casting. This has the advantage of simplicity of implementation (as it's just an audio layer similar to bluetooth audio) but it has some disadvantages in that the stream is highly dependent on the device and it's network connection, and more prone to dropouts. There's also additional load on the device which has implications, especially on battery life. It also means content is traversing the wifi network twice, and therefore put a greater load on the network, which in some conditions could increase the chances of dropouts.

Sonos largely works on pull, where the content is fetched from the source and the device initiating it isn't used. This has the advantage of using less network bandwidth and not being reliant on the device or it's wifi signal. The exception to this is when you play music "On This Mobile Device", although I suspect the same mechanism is actually used, with some sort of mini streaming server running on the device. This mechanism is focussed on streaming specific content rather than generic audio from the device. The disadvantage is that it's not as well suited to generic audio as push (for instance, if you wanted to use Sonos as a speakerphone for phone calls, or to play the audio from a game on the device). It also requires the playback device to support the audio encoding standard being used directly.

Chromecast seems to use both methods (although it may use pull as the basis and set up a streaming server on the device in cases where audio is streamed directly from the device).

So, it's a complex situation which is likely to be made worse with specific content restrictions, proprietary formats, DRM, and so on. So, whilst it's easy for me to say they should do this, the reality of doing it may not be so simple.

Cheers,

Keith

Hey guys, great discussion so far. It's great to see popular topics like this with everyone getting along.

I wanted you to know that this is something that I've made sure to share with the development team. I don't have any specifics I can share, as we don't talk about what's coming generally, but if is anything I'll let you guys know.

Since it was brought up, we're definitely looking into some more direct control integrations with services, both improving what's existing, and adding new partners too. Spotify Connect was a great addition and we're looking to add more integrations like this in the future. And as most of you know, we also have some teams hard at work bringing voice control to Sonos too.

I'm not knocking the Play 5, I think it is an amazing bit of kit, and a pair can really boogie, but they are extremely coloured (in a good way) compared to even a pair of decent bookshelf speakers.

A lot of the guys on another forum are swapping their Play units for these.....

https://www.whathifi.com/q-acoustics/q-bt3/review

They seem well pleased with them.
The sigh was about the above, and to the worn out subject of Connect SQ. Every speaker is coloured in some way, to some extent. It is the nature of the beast which is why personal preferences rule for speakers.

And the 5 unit is coloured even better once it has responded to room acoustics via Trueplay, since it has state of the art tech built into it that lets it do so, unlike passive bookshelf speakers that use tech that is decades older and mostly obsolete now. Which isn't to say that they aren't worthy of consideration in a room where acoustics and speaker placement isn't an issue. Along with messy cabling.

The BT3 is a good bluetooth speaker but with a limited feature set compared to any Sonos play unit. I did not find it to be extraordinary for sound quality when I was evaluating one for my TV room, to replace a broken down amp. So I preferred to have the amp fixed where it soldiers on with excellent for the application Quad 11L units bought in 2002. But a 1 pair + Sub trumps the 11L easily for my needs of music listening in another zone, and so also, will a 5 pair, I suspect. I certainly don't see any reason to swap out my play unit based set up for any speaker pair I have heard, and I have heard/used several in the past from the usual suspects - Harbeth. Quad, KEF and B&W to name some.

Of course, as I said, these are subjective things, so I see little value in knowing that some people on another forum think different and prefer the BT3, given that this could be for anything from feature preference to price to sound quality preference. And this has nothing to do with the thread topic.

Sigh....:D

The other reason for this, as I see it, is that there are many other places on the net that cater to those that want to discuss equipment churn. Sonos users are usually those that aren't interested in this for a raft of reasons.

I think that may be a difficult thing to achieve, Kumar. I am certainly no expert in this area, but how would a Sonos device know what level of normalisation to apply to each track in a playlist without first analysing all tracks in the entire playlist? If the compression levels and volume markers in each song are markedly different throughout the tracks in a playlist, it seems a lofty goal to have the sound level maintained throughout the entire playlist (at least without introducing excessive compression levels). Plus is it not possible when including tracks from streamed sources such as Spotify and Apple Music that the source track may change from time to time?

Again, this is beyond my technical expertise and I am genuinely interested in how volume normalisation would be accomplished.

Ken, that is why I used the word "smarter" in my request! Here is how I think it can be done though - in a playlist, Sonos has advance knowledge of the next song - how do I know this? When I play any Apple Music playlist, only the first song takes time to start; the same thing happens if I jump to the middle of the list. But when I let the playlist run undisturbed in straight or random mode, there is no such delay from one song to the next.

If this advance next track information is available in the buffer, the information to do the normalisation is available to Sonos.

So goes my logic, I could be wrong, but I think this feature is far more important than all the controller cosmetic rearrangements that Sonos does every few months.