I was really excited to hear that Sonos was going to support hi-res audio, but I had a tough S2 transition. After reconfiguring both my main wireless and Sonos networks, I’m able (so far) to hear songs all the way through and have not had a device go missing in days!
After this work, S2 still is very, very slow to load. Worse, it seems like a song will start to play before the buffer has enough data. So I will lose the first few seconds, then have a rough few seconds, then have the song settle in.
This happens when, say, playing something from Amazon Music on Sonos. It doesn't seem to happen once the queue is up and running, unless songs are skipped and rebuffering is needed. It does not happen with internet radio on Sonos, which is much lower fidelity. It also does not seem to happen with my networked music files on Sonos, maybe because they’re 360K MP3’s and local, don’t need much buffering. We have a very fast network connection and I have no lags at all when using the Amazon player on my computer, even for the 96K/24 bit audio files.
Supposedly S2 can play these files. Maybe that’s the issue here--hardware that was built to do something that it’s having difficulty doing, now that there’s more data to deal with? My hardware all passed the compatibility test, but still, it seems like both the connectivity and buffering issues fit with notion that that hardware is being asked to do a lot. I’d love to hear that there is work being done on a software fix. S2 just doesn’t seem quite ready for prime time.
Any thoughts on this?
Also, an aside. Some speakers seem to come up sooner from buffering than others. I know one speaker drives the other when stereo paired, but it seems more distributed across rooms than just that. Is each Sonos device doing its own buffering? I have nine devices. Wow that’s a lot of data, if so.