Sound Difference - Using Tidal/Apple music from within Sonos app and Apple TV versus Bluray

It depends on the bitrate being sent by the source. In general, a Blu-ray will usually be superior to the bitrate being sent by a streaming provider. They have to optimize for millions, perhaps billions of simultaneous streams. Your stream from a Blu-ray device is a singular event, and nobody has to ‘pay’ for that bandwidth. 

​@Airgetlam Understood. As per Apple high res lossless is 10 GB per 200 songs ~ 50 MB per song while a typical audio track on a Bluray could be 1-10 mbps. But now another question arises what is all that extra information packed into bluray audio tracks which is not present on the lossless tracks of streaming services since they also boast of complete lossless codecs and that no hearable information is lost during transmission. 

I suppose the streaming companies use different ‘versions’ of the files than are used on your Blu-ray’s. You’d need to ask them. 

Hi ​@AbhinavArya 

Welcome to the Sonos Community!

This is not possible on Sonos products - we support up to 24bit at a 48KHz sampling rate. This limitation is in place due to the demands of networked, synchronized playback and the increased bandwidth needed to play sampling rates of over 48KHz that are arguably indiscernibly better. 

Be careful not to confuse High Resolution with High Definition. High Resolution refers to the bit depth - the number of possible values the sound waveform’s amplitude can be digitally described by. 16 bit can describe 65,536 possible values, whereas 24 bit describes 16,777,216, so sounds clearer. High Definition - when it refers to online music streaming - simply means that it is CD quality, i.e. 16 bit, 48KHz, as opposed to lossy-encoded MP3 or a dozen other lossy codecs. A lossless codec like FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) or ALAC (Apple’s version of FLAC) is used instead.

So, if a stream is described as “High Definition” and/or “Lossless”, just read that as being CD quality.

If it is described as High Resolution, it will be 24 bit rather than 16 bit, but also lossless. If streaming to Sonos, it will be 48KHz, regardless of what is available via native, third-party apps, or websites.

As should be expected, as explained by ​@Airgetlam above.

A music Blu-ray has no concerns about bandwidth or data storage, so is likely 24 bit at 96 or 192KHz, and thus sounds better than the CD quality that will be streamed. It may also be mastered with more than 2 channels.

My personal assumption would be that Apple will also see the sense in not trying to stream 96 or 192KHz sample-rate audio over the internet for no real benefit. These sample rates are for mastering purposes - mathematical algorithms (filters or passes) may yet be applied to the audio during the process, so it makes sense to have a high as possible sample rate. Once mastering has finished, however, it makes little sense to not resample to a lower rate for distribution, as human ears really cannot tell the difference. For the Blu-ray, they likely just put multiple versions of each track on the disc as there are no concerns about filling it up, and it will keep audiophiles happy.

I hope this helps.