Sonos Era 300 vs Audio Pro C20: which wireless speaker is right for you?

Krautsalat

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Jun 7, 2024
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The C20 certainly sounds better than the Era and is way more versatile. That's why I sold my four Era 300s and bought four C20s after reading the review ... but there are three major caveats:

1) I run my speakers in stereo pairs, which sure makes the C20s sound phenomenal. But there comes the big problem: you can't run pairs via HDMI or optical, only single speakers. Bummer. Workaround: use RCA via an HDMI audio extractor.

2) The workaround above is absolutely necessary, since their performance via HDMI and optical PCM is abysmal. Even single speakers constantly drop the sound, and it happens to all four of them. Some serious handshake issue here.

3) Resolution, and that irks me the most. When streaming from the Tidal app via Airplay, I get an indicated 24 bit / 96 kHz stream which sounds great. When Streaming via Tidal Connect, the stream maxes out at 16/44.1, from both the Tidal app and the Audio Pro app. Normally Tidal connect should sound way better than Airplay, but on the C20 it doesn't even get close. Some implementation issue here, because the DAC can obviously handle 24 bit streams.

I opened support tickets on all the above issues awaiting response. I'm afraid though, they will end up going back.
 

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