Sonos V Bluesound?

However I am acquiring a Bluesound Node 2 to use for more critical listening at my main HiFi.


Yiannis I am in more or less the same boat as you are. I too switched to Roon and let it run my Sonos speakers. However, I gave up on the Sonos Connect (actually the ZP90) and replaced it with a very cheap Raspberry Pi which has been running Roon (Bridge) flawlessly now for over a month and which I use to send my music to the DAC (in both standard and hi-res). I am very happy with the results.

Thank you but I don't deserve the compliment 😉. I don't think it is remarkable to have a preference on a sound 'flavour'.

Actually you do perhaps deserve it:-). Speakers come in different flavours of sound where subjective preferences attach to these; streamers that merely pass on a bitstream for amplification do not, unless they also have a tone control either built into them, or as a controllable feature.

If the Bluesound streamer is without a built in permanent tone control and if those on both it and Connect are set to zero, any differences you hear are either psychological, or because apples to apples for EVERY other variable is missing. Or if you have the said special ears of course. And of course one can prefer the BS streamer for features that are missing on the Connect.

And someone else needs to verify the claim that in fixed mode, Connect tone controls cannot be used.

The linked review is excellent though, no question about that. Rare to find one correctly laying out the key differentiators that matter in actual use - more features where BS is concerned versus better stability for Sonos. But I think it still gets one thing wrong and that is when it talks about the two different approaches to sound flavours, with the BS sound tailored to and more suited for audiophiles that prefer a flat frequency response that delivers a cleaner but more sterile sound.

The problem with this statement is that it fails to recognise how any room found in a typical home will audibly mess with the sound delivered by any speaker in ways unique to that room. Regardless of how the speakers are tuned. That Sonos speaker sound is preferred by many as the review suggests is not because it is tuned for the mass market uneducated ears as opposed to BS tuning meant for discerning ears that know better, but because the former takes into account the room response as well and tweaks the sound to compensate for what the room does, to bring the sound back to what sounds pleasing to human ears - trained or not. Sonos does this in two ways - first via the built in processing that shapes the sound of the speakers and then via Trueplay which further shapes this based on actual user room responses. Which is also not to say that no one will prefer the room modified - which is an inevitable modification - BS sound as a subjective preference. But the reason for that preference will not be because it is a more accurate sound as the review suggests. Once the room has done its thing, what will be heard are the many different flavours of the original accurate sound, none of which are accurate anymore. How distant from accurate will change from one room to another.

And of course the above applies to only such kit of both makes that includes speakers made by them.

Emile that is a great choice indeed. I will send you a PM as I would love to hear your experience regarding SQ difference with the Sonos Connect.
I understand you had the ZP90 so most likely it is the bit perfect version which does not suffer from the soft knee compression that has been introduced in the more recent connect. Best if I PM you so as to not derail this thread.

Best

However I am acquiring a Bluesound Node 2 to use for more critical listening at my main HiFi.


Yiannis I am in more or less the same boat as you are. I too switched to Roon and let it run my Sonos speakers. However, I gave up on the Sonos Connect (actually the ZP90) and replaced it with a very cheap Raspberry Pi which has been running Roon (Bridge) flawlessly now for over a month and which I use to send my music to the DAC (in both standard and hi-res). I am very happy with the results.

For other readers of this thread: No one till now has demonstrated any ability to pick out any audible effect of anything done to the Connect by Sonos in a well controlled double blind listening test.

Hi Kumar,

Do you have a link to these double-blind tests. I would like to read up on them.

Perhaps I did not write clearly enough - there have been no double blind tests reported. It isn't that they have been conducted but no one picked out a difference.

How many of us have both a ZP90 and a Connect to test with? Moreover, once something is not it perfect any longer all sorts of tinkering might take place: it is what distinguishes one jpeg produced by camera X from the one produced by camera Y, which is why many prefer to work with raw files (yes, I know the analogy isn't perfect but it is the best I could come up with).

One not on the Digital Trends article. The much maligned (for obvious reasons in prior software update) feature of the red room (quick menu to add/subtract rooms from current playing) .... the reviewer didn't know about and listed as a win feature for BS (as their arrow menu)

How many of us have both a ZP90 and a Connect to test with? Moreover, once something is not it perfect any longer all sorts of tinkering might take place:.
I agree; and doing a good test is even more than just having available the two units you refer to. But that does not mean that one should start believing subjective statements claiming differences; to arise in reality, audible differences need more than what is visible on test instruments, and even more so when what one hears is after the involvement of speakers and room acoustics that can cover a multitude of sins and variables. Something might take place if there is tinkering, and it is at least equally likely that nothing will. And Sonos is the one that has done any tinkering - they also will not be reckless with the sound quality their products deliver; so what is the more likely from the two alternatives?

Then there are the psychological factors that every human brain is very vulnerable to. When someone discovered and reported here that Connect isn't bit perfect as measured on an instrument, he heard sound differences. Others who read this, who had not heard any differences till then, also started hearing them. Expectation bias is universal and very powerful as is Confirmation Bias, so this isn't a surprise. It is human nature and the human brain as it is wired to work.

Finally and most important to me: my personal experiences do not tally with these subjective reports; I don't hear any differences in two Connects. So for me to agree that there is something wrong with my Connect or my ears, I need more than subjective claims that no scientist will accept as valid.

Finally, even if there is some very small difference that only an "audiophile ear" can hear, it can be easily corrected downstream of the Connect in the rest of the chain that sends the sounds into the room. So even in this case, this is an irrelevant distraction.

YMMV.

The jpeg analogy is faulty because each camera's jpeg program contains the camera designer's view point of what a good image should look like that is baked into the jpeg, and also comes with a restriction on how much this can be changed in post processing compared to raw files. In this case of the Connect, the image is still raw, but some bits are missing. What remains is still raw. And the image that will be made by processing the two raw files by the same program may well be the same as far as the eye can make out.