playing audio without sonos app?

That’s kind of a loaded question. You need to understand the way Sonos works, and hopefully it will answer your question.

The Sonos app on your device, be it mobile or desktop, is not a player. It is a remote control, that talks to the software running on the computer(s) on your Sonos speakers, and tells them what to play. The speakers then reach out to get the music from wherever you’ve pointed them to get the music data, and play it.

You can also use a line in, either analog or digital, depending on the Sonos device, and use that to get the music data into the Sonos ecosystem, where it then gets buffered, and sent out to all the Sonos speakers.

Finally, recently, Sonos has added the ability to some of their speakers to receive an AirPlay 2 stream, so that you can use an Apple device to send music directly to the Sonos. At that point, you can “group” the receiving speaker with any of the other Sonos speakers you have, and play that stream on all of them.

I hope that answers your question…..it’s a bit of a longer explanation than a simple yes or no.

Thanks for such a detailed response. I’ve looked into the various methods that you’ve listed here and found that using AirPlay on an iPhone works perfectly with what I’m trying to achieve. :)

Outstanding. I use it with my PLAY:5 gen 2 speaker fairly frequently, and then group that PLAY:5 with several other PLAY:1s and PLAY:3s, and enjoy it immensely.