Comment by derriz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by derriz | Hacker News Reader

This is not directly relevant to the article - more a critique of the Sonos product which I've wanted to get off my chest.

I was a Sonos skeptic then a convert before becoming skeptical again. I stopped buying after the third Sonos 3 speaker.

Some basic features are missing which mean that users like me are clearly not a focus. Primarily I want to play my own, ripped-to-FLAC media.

The most irritating thing is that users have been requesting these features for 5+ years on the fora.

A random list of grievances:

- No regain support - this renders the playlist feature useless unless you want to constantly fiddle with the controller to adjust the volume between tracks.

- No cue support (i.e. single FLAC with a .cue file) which allows transitions between tracks. This breaks play back for lots of classical, Opera, ED music and classic rock albums like the Beatles' Abbey Road.

- Multi-disc support is poor - no grouping or separate disc images. 2 CD boxsets are o.k. but larger (4+) are unnavigable.

- Can't handle higher than 16/48 digital rips.

- No airplay, bluetooth, etc. support. This means you cannot use Sonos to replace all audio speakers in your home.

- Wierd/undocumented rules for file naming - silently ignores tracks with quotes, colons and maybe others (these are the ones that hit me)

- Finally the controller software has gotten worse with every update: poor album art caching, illogical navigation, confusing search, artist search cannot find tracks on compilations, etc.

Then again, it seems going the "smart speaker" route has boosted their revenues. I have no interest in such functionality so I guess I'm not the target market for Sonos.

This is a pity because much of the package is quite compelling and it wouldn't take much effort to support libraries (rather than streaming).

(edited for formatting)

I bought one and spent three days trying to fight the software. Seems Sonos are aiming for a cut of the streaming revenue: if you already own the music you’re a distraction.

Once I discovered you can drive the Sonos as a passive target from a DLNA device, things got much better.

Most of your complaints are perfectly valid, and some of the reasons I stay away from Sonos products.

But the "Can't handle higher than 16/48 digital rips" just bugs me. Digital sound for human consumption absolutely does not benefit from higher sample rates or bit depths than that. None whatsoever. Just downsample your "hi-res" collection using SoX or a similar high quality resampler to 16/44.1 or 16/48, and be done with it.

This is a bit of an interesting side discussion (I use sox indeed to down sample) but I've recently changed my stance on this after reading the results of some blind testing of MQA (24-bit at 192KHz or something like that) recordings.

My knowledge of analog and digital signal processing is superficial but I think I can at least understand the arguments.

I used to buy your argument on why sampling at more than 48KHz is a waste of time. The argument goes something like: humans cannot hear frequencies above 20KHz (less for older people) so as long as we sample above the Niquist frequency (40Khz) then the audible frequencies can be perfectly represented. 48KHz > 2*hearing range so QED, higher frequency sampling is at best a waste of time and may even make the sound worse.

The credible counter to this argument that I've read is that this argument requires being able to perfectly filter out the >20KHz frequencies before you sample. A perfect filter with an exact 20KHz cut-off does not exist in the real world - some of the audible range gets affected at the high end and also some >20KHz signal gets through. One of the resulting artifacts is pre-imagining (like a subtle-reverse echo).

If the blind testing of MQA compared MQA encoded tracks with and without MQA decoding, they were actually comparing MQA to 13-bit audio, as the (lossy) MQA data is encoded in the last 3 bits of "noise". That can definitely be heard on dynamic tracks. But CD-quality audio is 16-bit, which does not have an audible noise floor for music.

>"The credible counter to this argument that I've read is that this argument requires being able to perfectly filter out the >20KHz frequencies before you sample. A perfect filter with an exact 20KHz cut-off does not exist in the real world - some of the audible range gets affected at the high end and also some >20KHz signal gets through."

You don't need to cut off sharply at 20kHz, you have a band of 2.05kHz (for 44.1) or 4kHz, even with a non-oversampling DAC. Piece of cake for digital filters even 20 years ago, and reasonably possible even with analog filters.

But it's not even relevant for most people, since most DACs oversample to at least double sample rate, and can thus implement smooth gentle filters with no issues. That gives you the benefit of smooth filters you mention for high sampling rates, without wasting any storage space, making "hi-res" music pointless.

Read this: https://www.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html

My understanding was that the blind tests were not as naive as that and the comparisons were with full 16/44 recordings and playback.

Funny enough I have read that article on xiph.org - which is a good read - and was completely convinced.

But listening to guys like this https://youtu.be/geaoEt-9V-w has made me question this. He claims that in practice it is impossible to perfectly band-limit a signal (whether with digital or analog filters) and this gives rise to artifacts in the reproduced signal which can be observed by oscilloscope. And yes the guy seems to know what he's talking about but I'm happy to be corrected on that.

Having said all that, I've little interest in the top-end audio market so it's somewhat irrelevant to my needs. Support for hi-res audio is pretty down my list of irritations with the Sonos, to be honest.

Oh jeez, not that guy. He's a former hifi salesman, with only a very tenuous grasp of the technical details. I've experienced this countless of times, the salespeople completely buy into the "high end" mumbo-jumbo and don't bother to actually learn the technical aspects.

It's very common for them to show some minor effect on an oscilloscope, but ignore the fact that any artifacts from ringing and such would be close to the Nyquist frequency and below -80dBFS in the signal. In other words, utterly inaudible. For all their talk about trusting their ears, they seem to conveniently forget that maxim the moment it doesn't suit their made-up arguments.

Yes, in theory you cannot 100% perfectly band limit a signal. However, in practice you can band limit it well enough that any artifacts are either very close to or actually below the noise floor, and thus completely irrelevant.

On the complete opposite end of the scale of salesperson:tech guru, the article I linked was written by none other than Chris "Monty" Montgomery (xiphmont on this very site), who among other things founded the Xiph.org free codec foundation, and either was fully responsible for creating the Ogg container format, the Vorbis, FLAC, Speex and Opus audio formats, and countless other technical achievements, or at least had a big hand in them. Free and open digital audio owes a gigantic debt to him, and if anyone knows their way around digital audio, it's him.

May I add the lack of support for DTS so that a large number of hidef movies won’t transmit sound through the Sonos sound bar.

They still lack HDMI too on their two older sound bars.

I ended up going to Denon HEOS AVR which works great as a fully featured home theater amp (DD+ and DTS-HD) with wireless rears and similar casting abilities.

Out of curiosity, why do you need HDMI on a speaker? Especially considering that you don’t know how much latency the TV’s signal processing is introducing into the chain.

I just run an optical cable from my TV to my Sonos soundbar. It’s simple, it works, and I know that the audio will be in sync. And as a bonus, the cable’s thinner.

(I do wish they supported more audio formats though, with DTS and Atmos notably absent.)

> Out of curiosity, why do you need HDMI on a speaker?

Well, my TV doesn't pass through anything other than stereo over optical, so lack of HDMI adds on the expense and hassle of an additional HDMI switch with audio extraction to my AV chain if I want 5.1 audio.

Optical also doesn't have the bandwidth for higher-resolution formats. This means, for instance, that's it's impossible to play Nintendo Switch audio in anything other than stereo on a 5.1 Sonos system, as the Switch only supports LPCM audio output. (Also can't do Atmos over optical, but I tend to believe Sonos when they say that it doesn't help with actual sound quality with a regular 5.1 setup.)

> Especially considering that you don’t know how much latency the TV’s signal processing is introducing into the chain.

I don't know that I'd trust TV manufacturers to have lower latency on video input than on audio output, so this seems like a bit of a wash. Furthermore, the Sonos app has a setting to adjust audio latency. Personally, I use my TV for games and with a desktop PC, so any significant video latency isn't acceptable anyway, regardless of video sync.

> No airplay, bluetooth, etc. support. This means you cannot use Sonos to replace all audio speakers in your home.

Not ideal, but you can hookup an AppleTV to line in on a connect:amp and airplay this way.

Insanely expensive buy in for that feature. I just happened to have the amp as my first sonos product and an appletv I no longer use (switched to Fires)

Yes - this is what seems to be the recommended solution.

But as you say, it's insanely expensive particularly as my main use-case which was to allow my partner to listen to youtube videos from her iphone.

And as well as the expense - I don't have an AppleTV or Connect:amp sitting around - it feels kludgy to me as it involves a needless round-trip between digital and analog. Also it's not user-friendly - to listen to a youtube video cast from my iphone requires fiddling with 2 apps.

I run airsonos on a local server, which exposes all my Sonos speakers over Airplay individually.

Ooo thanks for this! Will try it out. I already have a pi running pi-hole, would be nice to have 1 less device sucking electricity :)

Seems like you've had a lot of experience with the products from Sonos.

When it comes to file naning, no same system wants to handle colons and other special characters. I know Macosx and classic has allowed it, and taught users bad manners.

I agree that for shells, some scripting languages and the like, file names with punctuation and other special characters can be challenging.

But Sonos doesn't have to do any "handling" here - the user never gets to interact with the network paths/file names so they should (I think) be treated as opaque identifiers.

You're thinking like a computer programmer who doesn't want to quote or escape their command line arguments. Non-technical users just want to write meaningful strings and wouldn't understand why a period should be allowed but not a colon. MacOS got this one right. For user-visible names, try to be as permissive as possible and allow as much unicode as possible.

Agree that he's "thinking like a computer programmer" with respect to the distinction between periods and colons, slashes, and so forth. But Unicode is different. If you can't type it on a keyboard, it doesn't belong in a filename.

Any person should be able to write filenames in their native language.

Not if they want anyone besides themselves to access the file, they shouldn't.

There are some good reasons to allow filenames with Unicode characters, but there are about a zillion good reasons not to.

They have AirPlay 2 support now.

No airplay 2 support yet, but they’ve given a July release date. https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/6/17434294/airplay-2-sonos-s...

Update - they announced it today: https://blog.sonos.com/en/airplay-is-here/

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