You’re confusing sampling rate and bitrate.

1536kbps is the maximum bitrate, for PCM 16-bit 48kHz.

Sonos doesn’t support a sampling rate above 48kHz. No human can hear ultrasonics, by definition. 

Thanks for your response. Sorry about the confusion, yes I meant 192kbps and 176.4kbps.

They should play but somehow the S2 app indicates that it can't.

No, you didn’t. You meant 192kHz and 176.4kHz sampling rates.

The controller message was that the file “is encoded at unsupported sample rate 192000 Hz”.

No, they shouldn’t play. As I said above, Sonos doesn’t support a sampling rate above 48kHz.

In fact, if you scroll down in the same support site you linked to:
 

Does this mean that all S2 fans waiting anxiously to play their hi res files are going to be disappointed even after Sonos finally makes that much hyped feature available?

Disappointment requires an expectation, and Sonos have not promised anything specific on hires.

Sure but I thought that hi res was commonly understood to be at least 96/24. 

Amazon has conveniently changed that to mean CD quality, but that is a recent "innovation".

So-called ‘hi res’ is anything beyond Red Book. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-resolution_audio

a term for audio files with greater than 44.1 kHz sample rate or higher than 16-bit audio bit depth. It commonly refers to 96 or 192 kHz sample rates. However, there also exist 44.1 kHz/24-bit, 48 kHz/24-bit and 88.2 kHz/24-bit recordings that are labeled HD Audio.

But wiki itself says that 96 or 192 khz sample rates are typical, being commonly understood to be hi res.

So all the kerfuffle about S2 is still not going to meet the hi res needs as commonly understood.

Of course I write this listening to 320 kbps lossy Spotify where the sq is compromised by something else entirely - fluctuations in sound levels from one track to the next. Addressing that would be meaningful progress in my book, instead of this hi res red herring that does nothing audible as an improvement to the listening experience.

Not as things stand, but as I’ve speculated elsewhere just about the only product which could possibly benefit is the Port (if ‘benefit’ means decoding and forwarding inaudible and potentially destructive ultrasonics to downstream kit) so Sonos could end up being forced into ticking that marketing box with a Port on a wired or 5GHz WiFi connection.

Only if (a) Spotify actually supplies gain parameters in the metadata (unknown?), and (b) Sonos sorts out their fragmented approach to volume normalisation.

@ratty : but the port won't even then do 96 /24...correct?

Correct, as it stands today. I’m simply saying that the amplified players/speakers can’t handle ultrasonics, so if Sonos were ever going to deal with higher sampling rates it would most likely be in the Port. If ever.

So that is the strange and confusing thing. The hi res thing was supposed to be the low hanging fruit from S2. Which Sonos has not made available even six months after S2 release. Which, even when they see fit to make available, still won't meet the needs of folks with hi res music files...

I don’t see how it could be low hanging. Shunting around files up to six times the normal size, on a multi-room system which claims to support up to 32 devices, is going to cause inevitable strain in some situations. And all for what? 

IIRC part of the ‘higher resolution’ play for S2, in addition to 24-bit support for local files, was in fact on the home theatre front with Arc’s eARC/Atmos/LPCM.

I hear you on the bandwidth subject; one just got an impression from all the comms that with S2, waiting for the hi res godot will be over.

I personally could not care less, and am happy on S1.