Friday, November 18, 2011
Sonos Drops Highest Quality Audio
We don't always get it right, when we get it wrong the best thing is to hold up your hand and apologise. Then fix it. Which I'll have to do today.
We've been ripping CDs for nearly eight years, initially exclusively for iPod / iTunes configurations and more recently for Sonos. That part of our business has grown rapidly so today we have ripped CDs for many clients who don't even own an iPod. These music lovers have invested significant sums in their music so naturally they don't baulk at buying a large capacity NAS drive to store their music. Storage capacity isn't an issue in these cases, clients want the highest quality sound.
CD ripping for Sonos took us into new territory, that of uncompressed music. The best quality digital music is AIFF. It has the benefit of being entirely uncompressed, it's exactly as appears on the original CD plus the features of a digital "wrapper" that holds the album, artist, track data etc. Before I leapt into this with Sonos clients I made some checks.
First, I looked on the Sonos website where it clearly said they support AIFF files. Indeed I looked again earlier today and on the opening sales page for their music player's features it lists AIFF as one of the supported file formats.
Second, I rang Sonos and asked them. I got confirmation of what's on the website. So I went ahead with confidence and ripped a batch of CDs for our first client. When we delivered the NAS drive with its files (I think the first one was over 700 CDs) I connected the drive, pointed the Sonos software at it, and updated the library. My client flipped through his controller, hit play, and we listened as Verdi filled the house.
Since then I've lost track of the number of Sonos / AIFF configurations we've worked with, all without issue, until yesterday. We ripped just over 650 CDs for a client but the signal drops out. Some tracks play fine, then another drops out. Frustrating and not what anyone wants. My client went back to the installer and he's replied quoting one of the Sonos FAQs - this says that while AIFF is "supported" it is not "recommended". There's a footnote at the bottom of that page which says -
Sonos does not recommend choosing AIFF files for your library because of AIFF's outdated metadata support. You can acheive the same audio quality by using FLAC or Apple Lossless, both of which fully support metadata and album art.
The installer is interpreting this as if "not recommended" means the same as "unsupported", and is refusing to help our client any further. Where does this leave us?
For my client it means I'll have to say sorry, admit that I'd not seen this example of weasel words, and possibly challenge the installers interpretation of the footnote. I will gladly offer to convert his music into Apple Lossless. Enough of my problems.
What does this mean?
Staggeringly it means Sonos no longer supports the highest quality audio. Nobody who's really into music is going to accept anything less than the best. Sure, Apple Lossless is very good, but it's not the best.
If you want music streamed at its best (uncompressed) Sonos has ceded the ground to other suppliers - Apple will stream AIFF all day long, as will better systems such as Crestron. Future home entertainment demands aren't going to be for more compressed formats so unless Sonos can address this they're going to struggle.
What does it mean for you, if you're planning to buy a home audio system? Talk this through with your installer but get an unequivocal statement about AIFF before you sign on the dotted line.
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4 comments:
You are uninformed. Uncompressed is no better than compressed lossless as far as ripped CD audio is concerned.
Think of it as zipping a file, but for audio. Take a word doc & compress it with zip. It's smaller, but you've not lost anything in your file. When un-compressed, it's a digital duplicate of the original file, bit-by-bit.
That's what FLAC and Apple Lossless provide - 40% smaller files than uncompressed audio... but when you expand them, you get an exact duplicate of the original audio stream, bit-by-bit.
Your argument is valid for MP3 files. An MP3 is a lossy compression algorithm - you actually lose something when it's compressed. You never get the original file or sound back. They are good, but not the best.
FLAC / Apple Lossless are lossless compressions - you lose nothing except large file sizes that clog up your network, cause streaming issues, and take tons of hard drive space.
This comment has prompted me to update my original post. The situation is that my client has confirmed his system is playing his AIFF files, much relief here. Further digging around the Sonos forums suggests that storing music in AIFF format gives rise to indexing issues, and you may not be able to access music in as many ways as you can if you store in AAC etc. I've also been thinking a lot about compressed and uncompressed music. Given the modest price of massive hard drives, the speed of domestic networks, why not? You'll never have that nagging doubt that compressing music is as risky as compressing images.
There is no doubt - lossless codecs simply don't lose any information. That's why they're called "lossless".
There are several good reasons to go with lossless codecs, especially with portable devices. You have small fixed amounts of memory and typically long slow sync times. Why double sync times? Why not have almost twice the music on your 64GB portable player?
Lossless is simply a better way to go. There's no reason to archive with AIFF.
You can always convert a lossless file to AIFF if you want to - without any loss of data (but why would you?)
Agreed. ALAC is the way to go
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