Focus on Music Library

Sounds like your issue is in the fact that Sonos had dropped support for SMB v1, which the S1 system uses to connect to your local library. As all manufacturers are moving away from SMB v1 to the newer SMB v2 and v3, I highly doubt if Sonos would go back to supporting the old version.

I have both S1 and S2 devices in my home, but I have managed to replace the main speakers so that I can access my local library with them. My S1 system is now mainly used for streaming services.

 You may have to activate SMBv1 on the Synology if it is possible.  Keep SMBv2 & 3 also active.

The biggest step Sonos could make for users in this respect is to find a way to end the 65k limit. This alone made me never even try it.

 That’s why most of my systems access servers.  I only have Sonos for its Atmos capability and for the higher quality battery powered speakers.

 The 48kHz sample rate limit is something that keeps me from adding more Sonos devices.

The fact that it’s an S1 system and only some speakers can access the NAS seems like some kind of misconfiguration on the NAS. I don’t believe S1 code has SMB2/3 support at all. 

To be fair, not supporting more than 48KHz, is probably a blessing for Sonos WiFi. The only real benefit 96Khz music has is as it’s higher bit-rate, and hopefully aimed at people wanting higher quality, it may not have been mastered as poorly as many CD’s are these days to just be LOUD. It may still have some dynamics, although it’s far from guaranteed. 

Another possible, but slight benefit of 96Khz is that it can make filtering out digital noise a bit easier. 

Once you go above that, you’re really just wasting bits and bandwidth for not much benefit. 

In the studio, higher sample and bit rates allow more software manipulation without harmful effects on the source, so is useful there, similar to higher bit depth image files being better for editing. 

I would be happy here if they made the memory available for indexing dependent on the speaker with the smallest amount, along with something in the ‘about’ screen that showed what was available and what you’d used. That would give real reasons to upgrade some speakers. 

Ian:

 yes.  S1 only uses SMBv1.  I thought you might want your library on S1 as well as S2.  Hence the need to see if Synology would allow SMBv1 to run along side the other more secure SMB protocols.

 BlueSound handles 96kHz OK.  Streaming music is not much of a load.  I used to stream DSD 512 with no sweat.  I think memory in the player is more of an issue, but I could be wrong.  Indexing a library has its limitations.