Contributor II

change bit rate in Sonos - feature request

Forum|Forum|5 years ago
March 19, 2021
13 replies
1210 views

Maybe this is addressed somewhere else, but I would love the ability to change the bit rate of the stream in Sonos.

For example when I stream Tidal through Sonos it is FLAC ~1000kbs. This is great when I want to listen to the music in my living room on a high-quality stereo set up. But when I’m just chilling around the house or cooking dinner, I don’t need this high bit rate stream, I would much rather use some thing at 256 or 320 KBPS. I know I can do this using airplay, but I prefer to use Spotify, or Tidal connect. As it stands now, Sonos always takes the maximum quality stream.

I have multiple teens streaming music in my house all the time, and we have a data cap with our Internet service provider. Would love the option of being able to use a lower bandwith stream for less critical listening and a higher quality stream when listening on hifi equipment. This will also be an issue when Spotify rolls out it’s high definition music option later this year.

What do you think, seems like the time has come for this feature?

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ratty

If the service offer different bitrates Sonos will request the highest available for the subscription level. In some cases it will drop down to a lower quality if the stream falters.

J

John B

@ratty . I was confident that was the case if connecting via the Sonos app but less sure where native apps were being used.

ratty

I have no idea of the behaviour when casting from a native app. Logically one would expect the Sonos player to have control over stream choice, since the app is simply issuing playback commands to it. On the other hand those commands could be more specific in terms of what to fetch. Something of a grey area.

I don’t currently use a service capable of casting to be able to experiment. (I seem to recall that the last one I tried, Amazon ‘HD’, cast in lossy only though this could have changed since.)

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