Roon to Sonos -- Airplay or Sonos Streaming?

[radix]

I picked up a Sonos One (gen 2) recently. I just noticed in Roon I had set it up to play via Airplay, but I see there's also a "Sonos Streaming" option.

Would there be any significant difference between those two transports? What are the main technical differences?

This is mostly an armchair question -- the speaker is in a bathroom so the room acoustics are pretty bad and likely swamp any difference in streaming protocol. Though I am curious what the differences are.

Thanks,
Marc

 

[dc655321]

Airplay sends from phone to speaker, the other way has the speaker connect to the service.

 

[Zensō]

The main reason you would choose one over the other has to do with multi-room grouping. In Roon, you can only group endpoints of the same type. So if you have older Sonos speakers that you’d like to group with your One, you’re better off choosing Sonos streaming. On the other hand, if you’d like to group your One with other Airplay speakers, you’ll want to choose Airplay streaming. If you won’t be grouping the One with other speakers it’s essentially a moot point.

This is assuming streaming from inside Roon of course, not using Airplay from the OS menu.

 

[radix]

The main reason you would choose one over the other has to do with multi-room grouping. In Roon, you can only group endpoints of the same type. So if you have older Sonos speakers that you’d like to group with your One, you’re better off choosing Sonos streaming. On the other hand, if you’d like to group your One with other Airplay speakers, you’ll want to choose Airplay streaming. If you won’t be grouping the One with other speakers it’s essentially a moot point.

This is assuming streaming from inside Roon of course, not using Airplay from the OS menu.

Yes, this is streaming from Roon. Thanks for the info, that's what I was looking for.

Marc

 

[pjug]

I picked up a Sonos One (gen 2) recently. I just noticed in Roon I had set it up to play via Airplay, but I see there's also a "Sonos Streaming" option.

Would there be any significant difference between those two transports? What are the main technical differences?

This is mostly an armchair question -- the speaker is in a bathroom so the room acoustics are pretty bad and likely swamp any difference in streaming protocol. Though I am curious what the differences are.

Thanks,
Marc

I use Sonos, not airplay, when doing Roon->Sonos. The main reason being that this allows control over sample rate conversion so that you can always feed the Sonos with 44.1/24. Some Sonos devices (see ASR Connect review) choke on 48KHz.

I am not sure there is ever direct service --> sonos_device when using Roon, as suggested in Post #2. Even when I turn off all DSP and sample rate conversion and play a redbook file from Qobuz, the Sonos S2 app shows that Roon is playing.

Take what I say above with a grain of salt. I am new to Roon and so replied in part to bump this thread in case others have thoughts on it.

 

[sfdoddsy]

When Rooning, I use Sonos over Airplay.

Sonos streaming adds a buffer to avoid dropouts and glitches. Despite having very good wifi coverage, I still get occasional dropouts using Airplay via Roon (although not Airplay via Apple Music). With Sonos these glitches are considerably less.

 

[Rollingsound514]

Old thread, but chiming in

Using Airplay with Roon you'll never get a lossless (purple flag), only high quality because they can't guarantee what airplay is doing to the stream (changing sample rate from 44.1 to 48 for example)

Using Sonos Streaming with Roon you get to go direct up to 24 bit 48Khz with a lossless path right to the speaker.

Using Sonos streaming with Roon can be kind of hit and miss, for playing multi room I tend to use Airplay 2 just because it's more reliable, even if the "Signal" path isn't as good hehe