Starting a week ago, Amazon Music no longer works on my Sonos 1 system!!

So I think it all is clear(er) now: According to KEN’s clarification of RIO’s posting above, Sonos Connect and Connect Amp Gen 2 should work with 24bit audio -- but mine are Gen 1 (the cost of being an early adopter).

Also, and as I wrote before, Amazon had extended automatically my Unlimited trial by one month, but that trial finally expired as of this morning (1/1/22) -- and it all works again. So this is the second time around that I got to perform this test/experiment, with the same outcome both time.

Conclusions: I have several very old pieces (Gen 1) that do NOT support HD streaming. Hopefully Amazon or Sonos will figure out a way to turn HD off (I can on my Windows Amazon Music APP; but not in the Sonos S1 controller). Until then I will unfortunately have to give up on Amazon Unlimited for now. 

PS: I never could hear the difference between HD 24 bit streaming and the regular streaming. I guess I am not and “Audiophile” -- or just plain too old and have listened to too much loud music. Either way, not worth the few k$’s to throw away my old equipment and replace with the new of basically the same functionality...

By 'HD', Amazon mean 16-bit CD quality, which every Sonos player has always been able to play. 

24-bit is labelled 'Ultra HD'. I have an S2 system, but within this some players are not capable of Ultra HD. On those, Amazon Music just plays HD.

I would have expected S1 to play HD versions rather than not to play at all. But apparently not? (Note: 24-bit is not available on S1 at all, with any player)

If you go up this thread, John, I described the “malfunction”: It was very weird. I was able to play the Ultra HD music through my (mostly...) S1 system components, but the music would jump across component/station to component/station. It worked if I did not play through more than 4 or so synchronized speakers/connections/amps at the same time. If I played through all 11 current speakers/connections/amps at the same time, then the music would “migrate” from speaker to speaker. After my Amazon Unlimited subscription finally got cancelled it all worked fine again (this happened twice: I cancelled, it worked, Amazon gave me 1 month free extension of Unlimited, it broke again, as of this morning Unlimited is canceled again, it works again).

That’s the summary… 

I really hope that Sonos finds a way to configure their (S1) service so it will by default disable HD streaming from Amazon (something I can do on my Amazon Music client, on my laptop...).

My understanding is the 24-bit Amazon Music service is only available on an S2 Household - I’m quite sure it’s not available in an S1 setup, in fact very little has changed in S1 since the move to S2.

I have an S1 setup here as mentioned with Play:1 and it’s still working fine with Amazon Music HD/UltraHD Unlimited, which is the primary music service I use, aswell as Deezer. So it’s all very odd.

I would be interested to know if the Velop mesh system was switched off and removed from the equation and perhaps just the router primary hub only was used with the Sonos devices, if the issue then goes away. I can’t recall the last audio. dropout I had with the players here and the Amazon service. It makes me wonder if the Velop system is playing a role in this, despite the coincidences seen so far when switching the type of subscription service. 

Ken: To be frank -- I am happy it’s working at this point (without Amazon Unlimited “HD”….). To move the system to a different WIFI would -- I think -- make the system inaccessible from my various tablets and laptops, which are running/signed into the Velop system. Even if the Velop mesh is to blame -- I am reluctant to mess with it because I think my employer has secured it further remotely, to allow my laptop access to confidential info through VPN. 

Also, as I posted a few messages back, the error log in Sonos had numerous messages like this:

Saturday, November 27, 2021 - 5:25 PM Central Time
Unable to play 'King of Carrot Flowers Pt. 1' - the song is not encoded correctly.

Not sure how Velop Mesh would “corrupt” the binary file streamed to Sonos...(?). This rather looks like Sonos S1 -- or one or more of its components -- isn’t prepared to deal with the 24 bit compression format, and fails to properly sync up with other components. That’s what it feels like.

As I said, hopefully, Sonos will allow me somehow to turn off HD 24-bit compression for/through Amazon unlimited. Currently, I am 100% certain that Unlimited and the default format how it streams music is what had caused the problem (at least preceded it; “root cause” is something deep in the soft/hard.ware I suppose).

Any changes to what Amazon is sending to Sonos would be changed on the settings of your Amazon account, not from within Sonos, who doesn’t have access to that sort of data. 

My Amazon music has been acting up again, sometimes it just stops playing music for a moment to a minute but a couple times it stopped playing music for several songs. The Android screen showed them playing and changing but no sound.

Changed to a different Amazon station and it started playing with no issue. Next time it happened I switched stations for long enough for it to start playing and switched back and the original station resumed.

System looks good, the WiFi channel isn’t heavily congested, matrix is all green and local FLAC files stream with no issues. I’m looking at Amazon as the source of the glitches and if they continue past the holiday, and I get less busy, I will submit a diagnostic and support request.