Connecting hi res mp3 player with with Sonos 5

Note that the FiiO player would output analog to the Five. The Five will digitise it on input. Audible frequencies only. None of the inaudible ultrasonics that ‘hi res’ claims to reproduce.

@ratty Ratty, thank you. Could I ask, will there be lost information through the digitizing? My hope was to download high resolution music to the player in hopes too lose some of the brassyness (if that's a world) digital music seems to provide. I hoping the analog format would do that, even though it will be encoded into zeros and ones again. 

Thanks again for responding. 

@Paul A 

One last newbie question. Will I be getting stereo when plugging into one Sonos 5 speaker with the Jack?

Thanks again

Nothing audible will be lost. Despite the marketing hype behind ‘hi res’, the venerable Red Book CD format is able to encompass the full range of human hearing.  

The ‘brassyness’ you refer to probably dates back to the designs of the early CD players in the 80s, many of which were pretty grim. Conversion techniques -- from analog to digital and especially from digital to analog -- have long since improved, and arguably plateaued many years ago.

@ratty 

Again, many thanks. Great info. And you nailed it that's exactly what I was remembering. My last system was pretty dated. 

@Tim K . I really think that the whole idea of using a line in and an MP3 player is misguided  Better to store CD quality lossless files on a NAS and / or use one of the lossless streaming services. 

Very true!  I was working on the, perhaps short-sighted, assumption that @Tim K had other reasons for wanting to keep a personal music collection portable.

@ratty, @John B 

Well both are true. I've never owned one before so I was interested to find out of it was superior to my phone. Next, I was going to use it to put downloaded files on and play through the powered Sonos speakers. I've never heard of a NAS, so I have some research to do. I just received the FiiO today  I haven't opened the package, serendipitously possibly. If NAS isn't lovely expensive I might do both. I thought the FiiO was a superior player and therefore provide superior sound. 

Very new to all this. 

Thank you for your responses. 

Hi @Tim K.

Thanks for the immediate response. I apologize for the late reply. Based on the information relayed to us, using the Sonos Play 5 or Sonos Five alone does not generate stereo pair audio. The Sonos Five needs to be stereo paired to another Sonos Five to generate stereo audio. They both have good points for lossless music playing capability. since MP3 is a smaller file compared to WAV for example or FLAC which are considered to have a richer quality in audio than MP3. their recommendation is spot on. You could definitely tell the difference between an MP3 audio format and a WAV or FLAC audio format. I personally prefer the richer audio WAV format than MP3 especially if played through a quality speaker. You can definitely tell the difference. You can give it a try if you have a CD player, you can use the CD player and connect it to your Sonos Play 5 using a 3.5 mm headphone jack (male on both ends). If you play the same music (MP3 and CD) you can (on the spot) tell the difference. You can also try signing up for a music service (that has a free trial for HD music) so you can check out the difference in audio quality.

I hope this answers your question. 

Please let us know if you still have further questions or concerns. We are always here to help.

Thanks,