I see that Sonos will now (sort of) stream high res files from Qobuz.
However… as the Sonos DAC tops out at 24/48 anything higher than that, rather than it being downsampled to 24/48 you get the CD quality version instead. Not only that there’s nothing in the Sonos app that I can see that shows if a track is high res or not and the Sonos app has never shown any sort of technical details on a stream e.g. bit rate or. stream format.
Add to that the fact that Sonos speakers aren’t that great anyway and on the Play1 and Play3 we have in the house I can’t tell the difference between mp3 and CD anyway my overall reaction is what’s the point of it?
I gues in your set up if you can’t hear the difference between CD PCM (44.1/16/2) and MP3, then you are unlikely to hear the difference between PCM 44.1/16 and 48/24.
However assuming Sonos Connect also offers this change then you could feed 48/24 into an external quality DAC where you might appreciate it.
I have noticed increasingly new content is natively available at 48/24, as it is not necessarily needing to be constrained by the more limited CD format of 44.1/16… or multiples of 44.1 sample rate.
Therefore if the distribution master is natively 48/24, converting to 44.1/16 won’t be an optimum digital conversion… again unlikely to be noticeable other than on higher end replay equipment.
Just looked at Qobuz on my Sonos app, can only see 16bit/44.1 kHz FLAC ?
How can you even tell in the Sonos app? I can’t see that it shows any technical information about the streams
IIRC only the S2 hardware supports the 24/48 service so if you have S1 hardware or a mix of S1 and S2 then the whole system will default to S1 capabilities.
When you add a service in the app it gives the details
I have a split system, so S2 products are fully up to latest spec
The connect won’t but it’s successor the port does, I connect my port to n272 via coax so am using n272 dac (I think?) Am tempted to try qobuz on free trial in cd quality (tried a hirez download once but can’t tell the difference from cd), however their website is priced in dollars which puts me off.
Yes if you use optical SPDIF input on your N-272 then you will be using it’s DAC.
I guess what currency Qobuz uses depends on where you are, fortunately it’s GBP here in the UK.
I just had a look at the Qobuz service in the Sonos app and it only mentions CD quality in the add service section. And even if it did mention hi res there, when you search it makes no mention of the stream quality nor when you play something from Qobuz. I’ve never seen any technical stream details on anything in the Sonos app no matter the source.
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