Bit rates, Mp3 formats & how to get the best from my sonos system.

[admin_exported]

Hello everyone, I have recently purchased a sonos system and I am very impressed with it. I had converted a lot of my music to wma lossless and this is not supported by the sonos, so I converted it all to flac. I have a couple of questions.

1. Does converting the wma lossless to flac make a difference to the sound quality, rather than ripping from cd to flac.

2. I have read a bit on here about bit rates for the music. 16, 24, 32 bit. The wma lossless files are 16 bit and are the same once converted to flac. Is there any difference in the quality of these and will my sonos play say a 24bit flac file.

Thanks for any help or answers I may get (hopefully).

 

[fatboyslimfast]

Evening M1rfy...

1 - Nope - lossless to lossless should be the same as cd to lossless

2 - any cd rip will always be 16 bit as that is what is on the cd in the first place. 24/32 would only be applicable in studio-master type downloads (such as those from Linn...). As for whether it can support 24/32, I would say not, as the sampling rate is limited to 48KHz, and most 24 bit recordings are sampled at 96KHz...

 

[Anonymous]

thanks that has helped alot. I am happy with the quality of cd sound so 16 bit is ok, Just need to get a dac now to get my sonos upto or past the quality of my cd player. Do you know if wmp player can play flac files.

 

[Alec]

m1rfy:

Do you know if wmp player can play flac files.

It wo'nt play FLAC natively. If you go here: http://flac.sourceforge.net/download.html and download flac for windows it should play them.

when i did this tags still didnt show up in wmp quite as i wanted them to, but matters were improved somewhat i think (it was a while ago, i still feel like a noob with it, and im thinking of changing the way i do things again so sorry to sound vague).

otherwise id just convert the flacs to a format wmp is happy with, or try another player that supports flac such as foobar, winamp etc.

 

[Anonymous]

I think I might just keep both copys of the cds wma lossless and flac, then I should have no problems whichever i choose to use. thats if I have the space on my hdd.

 

[Alec]

you could get an external and put whichever ones you dont use on it, flac or wma...? Do you have your whole collection in both formats curently?

 

[Anonymous]

no it is in wma lossless mostly but when I convert to flac using foobar the orignial files are kept so I have both copys. This is ok as only one set shows up on my sonos and one on media centre.

 

[Alec]

m1rfy:no it is in wma lossless mostly but when I convert to flac using foobar the orignial files are kept so I have both copys. This is ok as only one set shows up on my sonos and one on media centre.

Aha! Gotcha. In your situation id probably just convert the wma's to mp3, if you're confident in the original lossless quality (as you could then convert to mp3s of the highest standard that they could be, in a high bit rate, and barely tell the difference in nrmal listening conditions, imo), on the basis theyre pretty much universal so it would mean theyr good for sonos and wmp, but i can see why you want to listen losslessly, and many here would agree.

 

[The_Lhc]

In answer to the question about Sonos and 24bit files, no it won't play them.

Interestingly (YMMV), Sonos actually outputs a 24bit datastream, but 8 bits are used for volume control (so the original signal is not degraded when changing the volume), so there's only 16bits available for the audio itself.