Zp 24/96

I'm not here to defend marketing slogans or corporate mission statements.

My point is, however you interpret it, it doesn't make any sense to hijack it as a tool to justify why Sonos should do hires. It's an argument based on semantics and interpretation, and a pretty pointless one.

Even if the conclusion is that hires support doesn't meet this criteria, based on market size hires support will still be a towards the back of a long list of other things which also don't. It doesn't give any additional weight to the argument for hires.

This is what I would call "scraping the barrel" for arguments. I would put the accusation that Sonos isn't "hifi" because of lack of hires support into this category too.

Cheers,

Keith

I personally find it ironic that some self-proclaimed "audiophiles", a group who traditionally accepts such dubious marketing claims as "oxygen free" copper, "fast, faster, and fastest" HDMI cables, "Digital" coax cables, "directional speaker wire", "clean power cords", etc., etc., etc; are seriously debating the semantics of "all the music on earth." C'mon guys, get real. :rolleyes:

"All music on earth" means just that unless qualified. The reader's interpretation is correct. It's the statement itself that is inaccurate.

Add to that the further restrictions of codec, sample rate and bit depth and you arrive at something much less palatable to a marketing department's glib platitudes.

I agree that the ad’s statement is inaccurate but for your average Joe Blogs looking for a new toy it’s obviously an attention grabber. On taking one home I’m sure they would be impressed as to the abilities of the Sonos by having sooo much music available on tap by playing not only their stored music but also having the integrated services offered on top of the all the thousands upon thousands of radio stations from around the world.
The ‘average’ punter wouldn’t care less if there was no support for APE or OGG or whatever (hires in this thread’s case...) – probably not even knowing what they are. I’ve not seen any statistics but think I’d be right to say that if we looked at people’s stored collections the majority would be made up of mp3 and itunes libraries and those of the people that care more for fidelity would be FLAC or WAV. I can say that in my puff I have NEVER spoken to anyone – friends, colleagues, customers that have used any formats other than mp3 or FLAC (and the enthusiasts only starting their hires journey).

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying devices shouldn’t support lesser formats due to lack of popularity – they should do as much as feasibly possible and reach as wide an audience as possible.
However, I do feel that if people are using more obscure formats for whatever reason then they’re more likely to be technically oriented by installing or setting up their ripping software in a particular way rather than use pre-installed, default software such as WMP and itunes. If such a person was to look at purchasing a streamer, they would look at the specs of the device or even ask questions on fora such as this before shelling out their hard earned rather than buy blindly because of what an ad’s tagline says.

I agree that the ad’s statement is inaccurate but for your average Joe Blogs looking for a new toy it’s obviously an attention grabber.


Of course. I understand perfectly well why a slogan like that is chosen, but that doesn't make it any less disingenuous.

I can say that in my puff I have NEVER spoken to anyone – friends, colleagues, customers that have used any formats other than mp3 or FLAC (and the enthusiasts only starting their hires journey).

I have some MP2, which isn't supported by Sonos. I use Sonospy to dynamically transcode that material. Ditto hi-res for the few hi-res files that I have.

I do feel that if people are using more obscure formats for whatever reason then they’re more likely to be technically oriented... If such a person was to look at purchasing a streamer, they would look at the specs of the device or even ask questions on fora such as this before shelling out their hard earned rather than buy blindly because of what an ad’s tagline says.

I agree that a higher degree of knowledge on the part of the user reduces the likelihood of being caught out by misleading advertising. I also agree that an undemanding new user is fairly unlikely to discover that some of the claims made in the marketing materials are rather exaggerated. I don't, however, see that as mitigation of the intent to overstate the system's capabilities.

Personally, I didn't much care about hi-res when I purchased Sonos equipment and I care only slightly more now. I'd like to be able to play hi-res files, because I own some hi-res files. End of story. Some of the other shortcomings of the system are much more annoying to me than the lack of support for hi-res.

Some of the other shortcomings of the system are much more annoying to me than the lack of support for hi-res.
On that point I'm with you 100%.

Personally, I didn't much care about hi-res when I purchased Sonos equipment and I care only slightly more now. I'd like to be able to play hi-res files, because I own some hi-res files. End of story.

Other than DVDA and SACD, I'm not sure there was anything else in the way of hires files available on the market (except for vinly of course 😉 ) when I got in to Sonos but I am in the same position as you... I have files I'd like to play via the simplicity of Sonos. All I do at the moment is play them directly from the laptop via my DAC.

Some of the other shortcomings of the system are much more annoying to me than the lack of support for hi-res.

Not to take this thread further off topic but is there a product that does fulfill all your criteria?

Out of curiousity, why do the people want hires support?
Is it for the simplicity of one stored music collection? Or do folk think they're suddenly going end up with £10k worth of source...?

For me it is a bit of both - I've yet to come across a control system that's as good as Sonos. Obviously I can appreciate the audio limitations of what a sub £300 box can achieve but the audio geek in me would like to see (hear) how far a box like this can be pushed and like to think I could appreciate the difference on a setup like mine. But forgetting the hires aspect I know that to get better sound in general I'll either have to replace the streamer or get a better DAC at some point.

Not to take this thread further off topic but is there a product that does fulfill all your criteria?


No.

Squeezebox comes close in terms of feature set, but doesn't have reliable enough synchronisation for multi-room use, and that's something I use quite a bit.

On the other hand, it is without many of the other annoying limitations that Sonos has. If I were forced to live with the worst of these, such as the 65k track limit, I probably would have started to seriously evaluate whether I wouldn't be better off living with Squeezebox's limitations instead, but I'm happy to have found tolerable workarounds for the most critical shortcomings. Everything else falls into the tolerable shortcoming category.

It's also worth pointing out that my needs have grown over the years that I have had Sonos. It was perfectly adequate for my needs when I first purchased Sonos equipment five years ago, but those needs have not remained static. Over the years, my collection has grown beyond what the Sonos can natively track and serve, streaming services such as Spotify have arrived on the scene in Europe, and I now draw music from a much wider variety of sources than I used to.

In that regard, the Sonos is somewhat a victim of its own success. It has made the consumption of music so easy, that I am now much more actively purchasing and listening to music than I was a few years ago. My ownership of Sonos has directly influenced my requirements of the system to the point that they now outstrip what the system can deliver.

That said, I still love the system. I can't think of many other purchases, apart from a bed and a coffee machine, that I use daily and derive so much enjoyment from.

That said, my bed and coffee machine do all that I expect of them, but the Sonos could be so much better than it is. Its slow, closed development model is particularly frustrating, with some of the system's worst annoyances not having been addressed after years of user complaints in forum threads spanning tens of pages. I don't need to name them here.

In short, there is much that is good about Sonos and quite a few things that are not. Whilst it's frustrating to see firmware release cycles come and go without many of these long-term niggles ever being addressed or even discussed by the company, no-one else has yet produced a system that can compete when all of the pros and cons are weighed against each other. That's a situation that won't persist forever, of course.

As far as hi-res is concerned, I don't get involved in the audible difference argument. I would like to play hi-res files, just because I have some and because more and more music will be offered in these formats in the future, making for the prospect of ever greater inconvenience in having a system that doesn't support them.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I am a Squeeze user, but I have had Sonos experience both recommending and installing a multizone Sonos system.

I followed the link over here from AVforums, and have read this thread with interest. My reason for posting is to correct what seems to be a misconception about Squeeze ability to sync. I have a 7 zone system which supports a tight sync without any problems at all.

I don't want to pretend that Squeeze is free of reliability problems, but syncing doesn't seem to be one of them.

For the enthusiastic, the user forum can be found at:

forums.slimdevices.com

While the forum is full of issues, searching for 'sync' brings up very few.

Andy.

Try syncing gapless concurrent tracks in ALAC or 24/96. I imagine classical music fans, who would be more apt to use lossy or hirez formats, would not be too pleased if their gapless classical tracks could not be synced. Also, ALAC and 24/96, being transcoded on the server, are synced by dropping the bitrate, thus lowering the quality. Again, not quite the "audiophile" solution people here are looking for. And besides all that, the "sync" delay for Squeeze, when "perfectly" synced, is around 30ms, approximately 10 times the acceptable delay of Sonos.

Jgatie,

I believe that when synced, the server sets the bitrate at the highest common rate all synced players can cope with. So for a mix of players that can't all cope with 24/96 then 16/44.1 is chosen and HiRes files downsampled. If all players can cope with 24/96, then the sync is at 24/96. This seems a reasonable compromise.

You may be right about gapless, I don't have any 24/96 gapless material to test it with.

I dont follow your 30mS comment. Squeeze has no analogue input like Sonos, so a 'delay' in the stream is irrelevant. If you mean a timing difference between players of 30mS, then this would be very noticable, and I have not experienced this.