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Most of the time when streaming use the dual Sonos 1’s with sub in the kitchen for casual listening.  I do have a port too.  Amazon dropped the price of HD and now just using “free” prime streaming.  Would the gear I’m using be good enough to notice using lossless codecs?  I know it must be listener dependent but perhaps the difference is stark enough. I could play a cd and port it to the Sonos, but others have undoubtedly done this.  Appreciate any comments. 

It all really depends on your ears.

There are a number of posts here and many more elsewhere giving the formats the various services stream line them up from worst to best and give each format a listen.

Ripping a CD to FLAC and adding a Music Library share isn’t hard and that will give you a good baseline for quality.

Going beyond CD quality you’ll not find true double blind tests that are showing an audible difference. Again some good discussions here.

 

My ears are poor, I can’t hear any audible difference in Amazon Music, HD or UltraHD. I’d never know the difference if I didn’t look for the badge on the controller.

 I could play a cd and port it to the Sonos, but others have undoubtedly done this.  

Not worth the effort, but try it once to see for yourself if you have the energy, remembering to make sure that sound levels from the alternatives are as equal as you can make them.

Appreciate the comments.  My main question is whether my Sonos hardware assuming an intent listener with average room acoustics for a kitchen could produce a noticeable improvement with Amazon HD content.  I certainly can discern limitations of some MP3’s.   It is really obvious in my HT room which has decent acoustics and really nice speakers.  Adding the Sonos sub did help considerably in the kitchen and my wife likes the ease of use.  Thank you again.

My main question is whether my Sonos hardware assuming an intent listener with average room acoustics for a kitchen could produce a noticeable improvement with Amazon HD content.  I certainly can discern limitations of some MP3’s.  

MP3 inflicts quite a bit of damage, especially at low bitrates. https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/what-data-compression-does-your-music

Go for lossless (CD quality, or ‘HD’ as Amazon calls it) to preserve the original content. Ignore the ‘hi res’ hype.  

Thanks for link.  I don’t have much interest above CD quality but curious about Atmos content.   Mostly thought of that for movies not music. 

Thanks for link.  I don’t have much interest above CD quality but curious about Atmos content.   Mostly thought of that for movies not music. 

Ah, well, spatial (Atmos, 360, etc) is seen by some as the next big thing, but it clearly needs the right equipment to render it effectively, And obviously the content has to be (re)mixed in a suitable manner.

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