Apple lossless with Play5 / Sub Configuration

Hi @tomadelaney 

You are most welcome!

Largely correct, though I am not sure exactly of how to word it. “Sub Gen 2 is incapable of playing lossless via Apple Music, but it doesn’t matter when it’s connected to Home Theatre,” I suppose.

Sub Gen 3 is not affected by this. As for future software updates, I suspect not - if it was workable, it would probably already be done. I can only assume that there is a large difference between the way a HT primary tells a Sub what to play, and how a single speaker (or stereo pair) does it, and that this large difference implies a heavy engineering lift for changing it - for a discontinued product, my guess is was that it was considered too much. Remember - Sub Gen 2 was designed, manufactured and discontinued all before Apple Lossless became available in 2021.

I hope this helps.

Cory,

I am actually amazed that my Play:5, which I purchased eight years ago, are capable of handling lossless.  I appreciate all of your information.

I’d guess the difference will be in the HT setup, the HT Primary is doing the decoding of the input signal and sending the appropriate raw data stream to the relevant speaker, so the sub has little to do other than send input from the HT primary through it’s DAC to its output.

In an audio setup, the sub is more likely to be receiving the same stream as the speaker (ALAC, Flac, whatever) and decoding it itself with an audio filter for the crossover point and any equaliser/trueplay adjustments. Like some of the other older products the older sub then doesn’t have the processing power to handle decoding the higher bitrate.

Unless something has significantly change in the Sonos ABR code it uses a mix of rate estimate with buffer occupancy to decide whether to switch up or down on the bitrate.

https://tech-blog.sonos.com/posts/happy-music-streaming-with-mpeg-dash/

There may be a config setting in some older device firmware to prevent switching above a certain bitrate because the hardware isn’t capable of processing incoming network and audio fast enough.

With a HT product, I expect the HT product will be doing the heavy lifting of decoding and processing the incoming stream to send only the relevance channel data to each of the devices bonded to it.

All,

As a final note to this thread, I did upgrade my Sub Gen2 to a Sub Gen3, and confirmed that my paired Play:5s and Sub Gen3 delivered a ‘lossless music’ badge when streaming Apple music through the Sonos S2 IOS app.

Another interesting note:

I’ve been experimenting with a trial copy of the Roon server/controller and am amazed at how well it integrates with the Sonos endpoints,  Ironically, it is able to play true lossless (Tidal FLAC 44.1khz 24 bit 2 ch) with Play:1 and One models, but was a bit challenged with Era 100 and Play:5’s.  In the case of the Era 100 / Play:5, Roon can take hi-res feeds from Tidal and downsample them to 48 khz / 24 bit and classifies these as ‘high quality streams’, while the same streams through Play:1s and Ones come through as 44.1khz / 24 bit ‘lossless streams’.

One final note:
The Sub Gen 3 sound truly amazing.