Sonos supports lossless music from Amazon, Apple Music likely to follow

It’s taken Sonos 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 lots of audiophiles with Amazon Music, I imagine that there more people using Apple Music, so I’ll be very keen to see when Sonos drops that update. The company hints that it’s coming, in a recent blog post outlining HQ audio terms, but no timeline is given. 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. Now that many Sonos users are upgrading to the newer speakers that use the new app, it’s nice to be able to stream music in HQ easily.

Source: Sonos