Future Port / Amp Replacements?

If you are prone to believe things like inputs make a difference, Sonos is not for you.   Try Naim, they are built for those who think the “quality” of a simple conductor of electrons can actually affect digital or analog audio. 

Well, I am prone to notice the difference between CD quality and...tape cassette quality? Again, I’m heavily invested in Sonos and love the products otherwise - just want a way to pass a lossless signal from my turntable (or lossless audio recordings) to my Sonos speakers, which are advertised as being able to handle lossless. Thats one of the major benefits of wifi over bluetooth, is its ability to handle lossless audio.

The Line-In on the Sonos Port is lossless when set to uncompressed and fixed volume.  There will be no differences from the analog audio in to the analog audio out. 

At very best, the input on the Amp is downgraded to CD quality - that is not lossless. Also, see this:

https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/review-and-measurements-of-sonos-amp.6957/

I’m one of the ‘turntable folks’ he mentions in his review of the amp. 

One specific question: have you tried listening to an analogue source connected to the Line-In? I ask, because I have a CD player connected to mine that way and to me it sounds good. Perhaps my ears are not accurate enough, but I can’t hear any shortcomings.

I’m normally a fan of the Audio Science Review articles, but this doesn’t seem to be a very good one. For example he seems to criticise the mains socket as a “proprietary connection” when actually it is just a standard IEC type C7 plug and socket?

I’m impressed with mine - I think you would probably find the quality of the Line-In on an Amp or a Port perfectly adequate in terms of sound quality when using a turntable as a source, provided you use it with an appropriate good quality pre-amp (Edit: actually it looks as though the Music Hall products mostly have built-in preamps, so you probably won;t need the latter).

This is mumbo jumbo.  I am assuming that your turntable outputs an analog signal, for which the term “lossless” has no meaning.  The Amp / Port receives this and converts it to digital format to distribute round the Sonos system.  Each Sonos speaker will convert it back to analog to be amplified and output as music.  There is no perceptible loss of quality in this process.  Where there IS a significant loss of audio quality is in the vinyl being pressed from the digital master and then the sound being liberated by the application of a needle.

To address your main point….. Sonos does a perfectly good job with turntables.  But analog media is an add-on, not a core feature.  Sonos is fundamentally about digital music.  Always has been and always will be.  Don’t expect some sea-change in how your turntable sounds through Sonos, it’s not needed acoustically or commercially.  If your vinyl doesn’t sound as good to you as you think it should (does it?), I don’t think the “quality of the inputs” is the place to look for a reason.

Even in a good audio lab with a double-blind evaluation set up folks have not been able to consistently identify CD quality sound from (the advertising and revenue generating) HD and better versions.

If I had the option here I’d set my Sonos to never fetch anything higher quality than CD standard unless it was Dolby Surround or Atmos. Clogs up the WiFi and internal buffers for no audible gain.

As an expert (in the distant past) turntable user and setup technician I’d blame any audio issues coming from a turntable on a small set of things.

1. Improperly set up cartridge and tone arm. Several critical settings most folks ignore, they get the wires wrong too.
2. A worn, dirty or damaged record. Sometimes you can work around that with a  good cleaning or different shape of stylus.
3. Junk turntable, wow, flutter and rumble (bad bearings or drive) are the most common. A poor tone arm will also have issues with warped records that a quality one would play well.

Outside the turntable a missing, bad or incorrectly set preamp is common. Not so common would be bad cables. I’ve never seen a bad input jack but it could happen.

Buuuuut, not all DAC’s are equal, correct? So if the Port/Amp does a crappy job converting the signal from analog to digital, then no matter how high a quality turntable/cables/pressing you have, the sound won’t be any better than what you might hear over broadcast radio, no? I’m clearly not an expert and maybe not an audiophile, but I can hear a difference when my turntable was hooked up directly to analog gear in the past. Still, as it sounds like there aren’t any options (besides the Pro-Ject T2W and the Victrola Stream models), I’ll give it a try!

It’s true. They are not, but - as already said - the inaccuracies introduced by the process of making a vinyl-based recording and playing it back are likely to completely overwhelm any inaccuracies added by the D-A and A-D conversions.

I’m pretty sure you will be happy with the result, based on my experience using a CD as the source. Ideally you should try to have a setup which allows you to listen to the output from the turntable’s preamp entirely in the analogue domain, so that you can compare it with what you are hearing via the Amp. That way, if you hear something that you don’t like, you will be able to figure out whether the source of the problem is within the turntable/preamp or within the Sonos part of the system.