Sound quality better on boost than 'just' wifi. Fact.

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Smallish house, Sonos One stereo pairs in 4 rooms, plus ARC, 2x ERA300 Surrounds & 2x Sub in living room. Trying set up with/without Boost. Always Truplay tuned.

On ‘just’ the Deco single router house wifi, everything is solid. Sonos works perfectly. The house has around 100 devices using the router. We get no issues with anything.

On the (wired to the switch) Boost though, the audio drops in and out if you walk in front of speakers etc in all rooms apart from the one where the boost is. Tried EVERYTHING to reposition the Boost to no avail.

By contrast, you can place the wifi router itself pretty much anywhere and everything stays rock solid.

Why then, am I bothering with Boost you’re all asking? Surely this is the dumbest post in the history of Sonos?! Simple. The sound quality is much crisper and punchier on Boost than on just Wifi. It sounds soooo much better.

Why is this please? Anyone? There is no info anywhere on sound being much nicer to listen to on Boost (SonosNet) than on standard wifi. We put up with the drop out to get the nicer sound. Plus after about 30 mins the drop out reduces significantly, and does eventually go all together if you run it for hours. Clearly the signal strength is better on ‘just’ wifi. So why is quality higher on Boost?!

Would love to hear advice. Thanks!

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jgatieAnswer

Impossible if the two sources are the same. There’s nothing about the quality of sound that can be altered by the method of transport, digital streaming doesn’t work that way. There’s no increasing of the “crisper and punchier” bytes in the stream, they just don’t exist. You either get the entire stream, or you get stuttering and dropouts. If the source is the same for both, then the sound is exactly the same and your ears are playing tricks on you (as they are very prone to do).

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buzz

Grand Maestro

@BarneyM,

If you are very sensitive to the skew adjustments (very few individuals are) and your network is struggling, there will be more frequent skew adjustments. In this case the presence or physical location of BOOST might be significant for you — potentially resulting in fewer skew adjustments. Network issues will not cause “static”. If conditions are so severe that the buffers are exhausted, the player will mute.

jgatie

Thanks for all the suggestions. I always understood digital encoding to be a complex mathematical process of sampling rates vs bit depth vs compression algorithms, and that’s just when recording/encoding the sound or picture. Upon decoding & streaming more layers of computation is involved. So I’m not sure about the comments referring to the fact that it’s just 1s & 0s. But maybe I misunderstood.

It is. But it is wrapped in a transport method which guarantees that each packet of information will arrive exactly as it is in the original. So every download from the same source will arrive exactly the same as the source, or it will cause errors like dropouts or stuttering due to missing packets. There is no possibility that an error could modify the stream to be “crisper and punchier” because if a packet arrives with a single bit missing or added, that packet is rejected and resent from the source.

Think about it. A program on your computer or an app on your phone will not run if there is one single bit out of place. It just won’t. But we download and run programs/apps every day. That’s because the transport method used for downloading checks that each and every packet is exactly the same as the original, thousands of times a second, and if it isn’t, it re-requests the packet until it is. Same thing with music, except the music has to be almost real-time, so if it re-requests too many times, it exceeds the buffer and causes stutters and dropouts. Regular downloads don’t care about how long they take, so they can sit there and re-request until it times out or fails.

jgatie

If the “difference” in sound is due to skew, it should be easy to test. Play the source on ungrouped, unpaired speakers that are the same model. If skew is the cause (although I doubt skew could account for it sounding “soooo much better”) then the difference should disappear once sync issues are removed from the equation.

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