It’s taken Sonos quite some time, but the audio company finally has another app ready to take advantage of its speaker’s high-quality streaming abilities.
Amazon Music joins french streaming service Qobuz and Sonos’ own Sonos Radio HD as one of the few music streaming platforms that supports lossless audio. Select devices like the Sonos Arc and Gen 2 Beam soundbars can also play supported songs from Amazon Music with Dolby Atmos.
Beyond the high-quality 3D audio, Amazon Music supports both 16-bit streams, marked ‘HD’ or 24-bit streams labelled as ‘ultra HD.’ The sample rate also caps out at 48kHz for those interested. However, to get these higher-end streams, you’ll need to use a Sonos speaker that’s compatible with the Gen 2 app (the brown one).
While I’m sure there are many audiophiles with Amazon Music, I imagine that more people are using Apple Music, so I’ll be very keen to see when Sonos drops that update. In a recent blog post outlining HQ audio terms, the company hints that it’s coming, but no timeline is revealed. The audio quality explainer is very interesting if you’re into that kind of thing.
It’s nice to see Sonos expanding to support high-quality audio from more services. Apple and Amazon both added lossless streaming to their services in May 2021, and Tidal has had the feature for ages.
Source: Sonos
