Headliner I

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S2 High Res HD Amazon Your Assessment Please Before & After

Forum|Forum|5 years ago
January 20, 2021
20 replies
654 views

Evening all.

I’ve now upgraded all my old gear and gone full S2.

Not greatly worried by the value/promises/what’s to come debate BUT, would love to hear your audio assessment before any after of going Amazon HD on S2 please.

All my boxes ( Connect Amp’s and a Port & several SW’s) are linked to B&W CCM 684’s and 682’s and are hard wired RJ45..

Simple question …. can you tell the difference? Before Amazon HD and after going Amazon HD on an S2 system? And how big of an improvement is it?

Thanks

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Best answer by ratty

@attacama40 I sense that you may have a bit of a Fear Of Missing Out on some form of music nirvana. You needn’t feel that way. The numbers game is relentlessly exploited by those in the industry anxious to encourage consumers to buy more equipment and to replace their music collection with so-called ‘hi-res’ versions (some of which have been exposed as nothing more than 16/44 content in a ‘hi-res’ container).

Here are some articles that might interest you:

What Data Compression Does To Your Music (and why lossless is worthwhile)

Researching HD-Audio: The Truth (‘Hi-Res’ has no perceptible fidelity improvement over CD Red Book)

and follow the links in

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_Quality_Authenticated#Criticism

Show previous replies

ratty

FLAC I also have on my NAS. And Deezer gives you better audio source than say … Spotify?

Deezer HiFi is lossless CD quality FLAC. Spotify is lossy 320kbps Ogg Vorbis.

In many situations listeners might not notice the difference, and Vorbis is up there with AAC in terms of its codec quality.

While the vast majority of content on Deezer HiFi is in FLAC it occasionally streams old music in 320kbps MP3. I can usually tell that something doesn’t sound quite right.

A

attacama40Author

Headliner I

FLAC I also have on my NAS. And Deezer gives you better audio source than say … Spotify?

Deezer HiFi is lossless CD quality FLAC. Spotify is lossy 320kbps Ogg Vorbis.

In many situations listeners might not notice the difference, and Vorbis is up there with AAC in terms of its codec quality.

While the vast majority of content on Deezer HiFi is in FLAC it occasionally streams old music in 320kbps MP3. I can usually tell that something doesn’t sound quite right.

super stuff, thanks for explaining.

K

Kumar

And to be honest Kumar this is where I get bogged down … in the technical nomenclature etc. I just want to know is it any thing that can be really heard? Or come to that Tidal or any other ‘better quality’ offering.

The marketing intent IS to confuse you with numbers and fancy labels to con you into paying more for what is a commodity at the end of the day.

Almost all the audible SQ is based on mastering quality, speaker quality/placement and room acoustics. None of which is influenced by the bits and bytes in the stream.

IMO the way to pick streaming services is to forget about the premium HD offerings that are high priced and choose between the regular Amazon/Apple/Spotify kind of services based on whose UI best suits you. Keeping also in mind what interfaces well with Sonos - for instance, Apple Music cannot be used via its native app.

A

attacama40Author

Headliner I

And to be honest Kumar this is where I get bogged down … in the technical nomenclature etc. I just want to know is it any thing that can be really heard? Or come to that Tidal or any other ‘better quality’ offering.

The marketing intent IS to confuse you with numbers and fancy labels to con you into paying more for what is a commodity at the end of the day.

Almost all the audible SQ is based on mastering quality, speaker quality/placement and room acoustics. None of which is influenced by the bits and bytes in the stream.

IMO the way to pick streaming services is to forget about the premium HD offerings that are high priced and choose between the regular Amazon/Apple/Spotify kind of services based on whose UI best suits you. Keeping also in mind what interfaces well with Sonos - for instance, Apple Music cannot be used via its native app.

Thanks for the input Kumar. Yes it’s a weird one this. I was sort of hoping for a night and day, before and after push to go buy some higher end music sources.

I did test a Tidal account for a while and there were a couple of tracks that I listened to that I convinced myself that I could hear ‘new things’ in there. And it really did feel so. But I was keen to understand the experiences of others who have done the before and after. Seems it’s a more complex question with less opinions than I might have imagined.

In the old days, a master album or a SACD seemed to be measurable. Maybe it wasn’t in really. I was also one of that that bought some audio DVD’s and bought into that for a while. That actually was quite measurable.

Agree about the numbers etc.

K

Kumar

I have playlists on YouTube Premium of songs that I like, and the full AV experience from these is something else altogether, but that is because of the added dimension of being able to see as well as hear. Piped through a Connect, the sound is much better than from the thin TV speakers, but not any better than pure audio similarly played.

If there are any differences on the audio side, they will not be night and day. Isn’t that a good thing though - no need to spend more on sources!

Your best bet for S2 that you have moved to is for enhanced experiences for the Sonos HT/TV products, as and when Sonos invents these and releases them under the S2 environment.

K

Kumar

And as I have pointed out today in another thread, the big improvement in audio that is there to be had - but Sonos does not offer - is effective volume normalisation. Even in a Spotify playlist playing on Sonos via either the Sonos controller or via the Spotify app, I have to keep reaching for the phone to adjust volume levels, something that can get tiresome. I have even deleted some songs that are outliers on the sound level thing, but are otherwise excellent, from my party playlists.

Spotify claims to offer this feature, but the only way to even test to see how effective it is, is via a phone wired to the Line in jacks on a Sonos unit.

If this can be had more conveniently on Sonos in future, it will be of far more value than the HD red herring.

rattyAnswer

@attacama40 I sense that you may have a bit of a Fear Of Missing Out on some form of music nirvana. You needn’t feel that way. The numbers game is relentlessly exploited by those in the industry anxious to encourage consumers to buy more equipment and to replace their music collection with so-called ‘hi-res’ versions (some of which have been exposed as nothing more than 16/44 content in a ‘hi-res’ container).

Here are some articles that might interest you:

What Data Compression Does To Your Music (and why lossless is worthwhile)

Researching HD-Audio: The Truth (‘Hi-Res’ has no perceptible fidelity improvement over CD Red Book)

and follow the links in

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_Quality_Authenticated#Criticism

K

Kumar

@attacama40 I sense that you may have a bit of a Fear Of Missing Out on some form of music nirvana.

It could also be - I have spent so much money moving to S2, how do I get a return for that?!

A

attacama40Author

Headliner I

@attacama40 I sense that you may have a bit of a Fear Of Missing Out on some form of music nirvana. You needn’t feel that way. The numbers game is relentlessly exploited by those in the industry anxious to encourage consumers to buy more equipment and to replace their music collection with so-called ‘hi-res’ versions (some of which have been exposed as nothing more than 16/44 content in a ‘hi-res’ container).

Here are some articles that might interest you:

What Data Compression Does To Your Music (and why lossless is worthwhile)

Researching HD-Audio: The Truth (‘Hi-Res’ has no perceptible fidelity improvement over CD Red Book)

and follow the links in

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_Quality_Authenticated#Criticism

Made me laugh Ratty …. yes that’s exactly what it is. I am the sort of bloke that if I have a new car and choosing options, that if I don’t tick every single box, it feels a missed opportunity :-)

Brilliant, thanks for the links, I will be reading those very carefully.

Jeffrey_35

Headliner III

Have you looked at Sonos HD Radio? If you are not interested in specific songs but genre stations it is actually very good and optimized for the Sonos products. I can hear a decent difference than Sonos Radio. Try it out.

“The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.”

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