Sonos support for Apple Music's Lossless Audio

I hope this comes to the native Sonos App as well.  I only have Airplay 2 Sonos devices and it is not optimal but Airplay supports 16/44.1 ALAC via airplay so CD quality should be doable via Airplay (unless Sonos does something like upsample everything to 48Hz like ATVs do - in which case it would still work just be upsampled to from 16/44 to 16/48) .  Other than a buffer increase and output grouping for Synced audio (much like Sonos) airplay 2 didn’t add much.   Airplay already “handed off” the stream (unless you are screen mirroring and not an app that natively supports airplay so you phone had to remain on.

The big thing missing for me by using Apple Music and Airplay is shared Queue support.  I can add songs with my phone, my wife can add songs with hers.  If I airplay, her airplay would override mine, there is no concept of a queue.  The entire remote control is clunky.  Spotify Connect is miles better.

Airplay 2 was supposed to add a shared queue but it only works on “player” devices (which are currently only homepods or ATVs)…  Receiver devices which all 3rd party speakers and receivers/tv devices like Sonos are, just output a stream.  Even the apps themselves when acting as a player can’t be controlled with another ipad or phone…  so you couldn’t leave an ipad in a dock and control it.

Ironically you used to be able to when home streaming with the remote app… used the DACP protcol and you could use all sorts of features (itunes DJ, etc...) but it only worked with local music on your itunes server.  In some ways airplay is a step back…

So for the simplicity, its Sonos app here.  Lets hope the Sonos implementation supports it.  AFAIK Sonos was the only 3rd party that used an API to access Apple Music directly, and it hasn’t always kept feature parity with Apple Music (no access to the For You playlists for example).  Apple probably does the bare minimum to update it.  Everyone else relies on airplay to support Apple Music.

I am not familiar with airplay or airplay 2 hence this question:

If the phone is playing Apple Music HD - beyond even CD density - and the music is being streamed from the phone to any Airplay 2 capable Sonos speaker, will Sonos be able to play it? 

Yes, but it will be resampled to 16/44.1 for airplay by iOS at a system level.  At least thats how it currently works.  

Apple could instead just pass the 16/44.1 version of the track instead with some trickery… depends if they keep different versions of a track in the cloud or only have a single hires version and rely on the phone to downsample it to 16/44.1 if thats all thats selected...

How in the world could Sonos possibly have control over functionality of the Apple music app?  Obviously, Apple has to be onboard with any casting feature.  And we know that Sonos has an open API which would allow for any 3rd party code to do casting. You could argue that Apple may want their API used instead of Sonos, but that seems unlikely since Apple doesn’t seem to have an API for casting, and it would make sense for the API used to be dictated by the device with less firmware resources.

So the question then is, does Apple just not want to cast to Sonos?  They would prefer you use airplay 2? They do prefer airplay 2 over casting, for multiple reasons.  For one, airplay 2 is licensed out to smart speaker makers. They make money off of it, where as they don’t with casting.  The other is that airplay 2 streams can only originate from Apple devices.  So you have to buy Apple to use it.  They don’t really want you casting Apple music to Sonos from an android device.  Heck I bet they would prefer you not play Apple music on Sonos at all, use their speakers instead.  Only reason they don’t do that is that they risk losing too many customers with that restriction.

It’s not like this is a new strategy for Apple.  They have always been more of a closed system, choices to restrict customer options and push you into the Apple ecosystem wherever they can.  They only time they don’t do that is where they don’t enough of the market to force you into that, or they don’t have much to gain by forcing you.  I have no doubt that if Apple had their own smart speakers when Sonos started getting popular, they wouldn’t let you stream Apple music on Sonos.  And they didn’t limit airplay 2 to Apple speakers for the same reason, it would have failed miserably without involving other smart speaker makers.

What history are you referring to?  The adoption of airplay 2?  Both Apple and Sonos stood to gain by that.  Sonos does stand to gain with moor HD/Hires streaming services, but it’s debatable if Apple stands to gain.  They could easily decide that limiting it to their speakers, appletv is better for them strategically.  Maybe, maybe not, but it’s up to Apple to decide.

So then if the phone is playing Apple HD, the same file will get downsampled and the benefit, if any, of any remastering will be available via Sonos as well I suppose, because by all accounts it  is this remastering that lies behind the perceived better sound quality. But all this, for people that are able to and happy to use Airplay.

The reason I invested in Sonos back in 2011, is because Airplay via AEX units was not as stable as I need music play to be, and I therefore did not even bother to check out Airplay 2 when that arrived. And my preference for native app use is met by Spotify, so there is nothing that makes Apple Music a must have for me.

Just for posterity in case anyone missed it as I see a few speculating…

@James L. I read through this thread and understand your answer. Perhaps there is power in the community of Apple Music / Sonos users collectively requesting that Apple support lossless on Sonos. However, it would be much better for Sonos to be proactively working with Apple as much as possible to make this happen and to communicate to the Sonos community exactly what Sonos is doing in this regard - v.s. simply saying it is up to Apple. As a Sonos user, I expect that Sonos is working with all important music services to get the best experience for Sonos users. So be vocal about that!  thx.

You’ll never get any company to be transparent about their direct interactions with another company. It just doesn’t happen, for all sorts of reasons. 

Frankly, Sonos has never related any information about software features under development. The most you’d see is when something is being tested in the beta environment, if you’re a beta tester, and NDA’d to not talk about it. Those of us in the community at large will only ever find out about features when they get released.

Looks like apple are opening up Airplay 2 to be able to stream up to 24/192 as long as your end point has a DAC that can recieve that. 

In my case my Sonos Amp is my end point so the question is will Sonos now expand on its 24/48 limitation it has with Qobuz and let us hear hi res streaming from Apple Music? 

I know Sonos seems to be against hi res streaming but it's moving from a niche market into the mainstream now with Apple / Amazon and Spotify all going to be providing hi res streaming as standard. 

My understanding is AirPlay 2 can support upto 24/48 but at the moment is capped at 16/44. I don’t think Spotify are going to offer beyond cd quality. Again it will be interesting to see what implementation of native Spotify support sonos will give when it launches. Also we will have to see what way Spotify connect will work with Sonos and other devices. I think if Spotify stay at 16/44 than the connect feature should be ok. But will Sonos say it’s up to Spotify to implement the audio improvements natively they probably will. Finally my understanding is that to go beyond 24/48 with Apple Music will be a usb dac job only from a mac or iPhone/iPad. Etc (yes Android supports Apple Music but android resamples all signals being output over usb). I have no idea about Amazon music as have never used it due to it not being available here. Certainly interesting times ahead.