CD Quality Wireless Audio

SONOS S5. Add as many as you want (up to 32). Add a Zone Bridge if needed. And control it from your PC, iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad, Android device, or the SONOS CR200 controller. You can also use 2 of them as a stereo pair in 1 zone.

>>Support for compressed MP3, iTunes Plus, WMA (including purchased Windows Media downloads), AAC (MPEG4), Ogg Vorbis, Audible (format 4), Apple Lossless, Flac (lossless) music files, as well as uncompressed WAV and AIFF files.

Native support for 44.1kHz sample rates. Additional support for 48kHz, 32kHz, 24kHz, 22kHz, 16kHz, 11kHz, and 8kHz sample rates.<<

So it claims to support red book losslessly.

Their system applies sample rate conversion, same as AppleTV, so it always runs as one sample rate. But I see no evidence that they apply compression. Do they say that somewhere?

The only compression offered by Sonos is as an option on the Line-In jacks on each ZonePlayer. Local library file sources are streamed over their proprietary SonosNet wireless protocol -- 2.4GHz, but not 802.11g -- as files, as-is.

There is no "input side" the way you're thinking of it except on the Line-In. The ZonePlayers receive the files, decode them to, in effect, wav's, and that output is made available to both the DAC to supply the amplifier input (internal or external, depending on model), and the optical and coax digital outputs (again, depending on model).

The S5 sounds amazingly good for a little portable boombox-sized unit. If you want better speakers, they can be wired directly to an amplified ZonePlayer 120 (which also includes an output for a powered subwoofer).

I don't even have a CD player anymore. Sonos -- and units like it -- have made it obsolete.

Other option is an Airport Express or any receiver that supports AirPlay - either supports Apple Lossless playback from iTunes (not as nice as an open lossless standard, but it does the job)...

Jeff

Audio Pro out of Scandinavia. You can stream wirelessly with out any compression to their speakers or buy the send/receive unit and stream to your system.

http://www.audiopro.com/

This Stereophile review confirms Sonos is lossless:

Skeptical aren't we.


And what frequency do you think 802.11g uses?

All else being equal, yes. What Sonos claims to do is package the audio in such a way as to improve the robustness of the link. That's an inaudible difference, until you need it.


No. It could theoretically be worse if the source is 44.1. Depends on the quality of the upsampler.


There are many flavors of HD audio. The raw payload would be calculated by 24 bits x 96 kHz = 2.3 Mbps per channel, no error correction overhead included. 2-ch CD is 1.44 Mbps.


Latency has no effect on sync if it applies to both the audio and video equally. If you're asking how much delay offset can be tolerated, it is dependent on the particular observer, but 30-40 ms audio lag is about where it becomes an issue. If you have an AVR with a manual lip sync control, you can try applying 30-40-50-60 ms delay and see how it feels. That would be the best way to judge. Use a news broadcast so it is actual synced content, not ADR movie content.

Sonos doesn't transmit the audio, it transmits the files from a hard drive somewhere on your network. It's a networking protocol while in the transmit stage. Once the packets arrive at the ZonePlayer, it decodes them into audio.

It's no different from playing a lossless file -- like a FLAC or ALAC -- located on your computer with the media player on a laptop. The file is transferred over the network, is decompressed by the media player, and is output as audio by the laptop. The only difference is Sonos uses one of their specialized ZonePlayers instead of the laptop/media player, and they use their proprietary SonosNet instead of standard 802.11 wireless. The basic transport concept, though, is pretty much the same.

There's a lot more that Sonos can do, like stream to as many as 32 ZonePlayers in perfect sync, but that's another story for another day.

Error correction and buffering to ensure smooth playback.No compression.