If you’re a Sonos owner, I know that right now you’re probably less interested in talking about streaming services, and a lot more concerned about when (or if) the company will ever finish fixing its “new” mobile app. I wish I had something positive to share on that front, but alas, like you, I’m also waiting for the day when I can once again reliably adjust the volume on my speakers.
I’m confident that day will (eventually) come, and I haven’t thrown the towel in on Sonos despite the agony of the past eight months. In the meantime, I want to address a question I’ve been asked several times: What’s the best hi-res streaming service for Sonos owners?
As is so often the case, the answer is (sorry), it depends.
As of 2025, there are only four music streaming services that support better-than-CD-quality hi-res audio and have song catalogs that are guaranteed to cover a significant number of artists from a wide variety of genres. They are: Amazon Music, Apple Music, Qobuz, and Tidal. All four are compatible with Sonos, which means you can add them to the Sonos app, but that doesn’t mean they’re all treated the same way by Sonos. Here’s what you need to know.
Price
In terms of price, if you’re an Amazon Prime member, Amazon Music is the least expensive option: Even with its recent price hike announcement, Prime members can get an individual plan for $10 per month. If you aren’t a Prime member, Amazon Music, Apple Music, and Tidal all cost the same at $11 per month, while Qobuz remains the priciest option at $13 per month.
Catalog size
In the early days of streaming, catalog size could vary a lot between services. Today, they’re essentially at parity, with each service promising the same “more than 100 million tracks” to pick from, with the exception of Tidal, which specifically calls out its more than 110 million tracks on its homepage.
Will Tidal’s extra 10 million tracks make a difference to you? It’s hard to say. None of the services provide a detailed look at their collections, so there’s no way to do a granular comparison by artist, genre, or any other criteria.
What might make a difference is Apple Music’s import function. You can use it to upload any digital music you own. If the track already exists in the Apple Music catalog, that’s the version you’ll have access to. If it doesn’t exist, you’ll stream your uploaded copy. Unfortunately, imports are limited to CD-quality, so this isn’t a way to expand your hi-res catalog.
Sonos app integration
With the exception of Tidal, which lets you choose Sonos speakers directly from its mobile app, the only way to listen to these services at their maximum quality on a Sonos speaker is via the Sonos app itself. AirPlay 2 and Bluetooth may be more convenient, but they’re both lossy technologies.
I bring this up because Sonos’ integration of music services can vary wildly in terms of user experience. For instance, in the regular Apple Music app, you can look for an artist and then begin streaming their top tracks. In Sonos, you can see a list of their top tracks, but if you wanted to play them sequentially or randomly, you’d need to add each one to your play queue manually.
Amazon and Tidal fare better within the Sonos app — each gives you access to an artist’s top tracks just as you’d get in their standalone mobile app. Qobuz’s integration is arguably the worst. Going to an artist page within Sonos gives you a list of their albums by default, no top tracks anywhere in sight.
Sonos compatibility
Most Sonos users have become accustomed to the fact that their speakers work with just about every streaming service you can think of. And while that’s true, not all of these streaming services are treated alike.
From a hi-res point of view, Sonos speakers currently support a maximum lossless quality of 24-bit/48kHz. That’s far lower than the maximum hi-res settings of the four services we’ve been discussing, and yet only Apple Music, Amazon Music, and Qobuz are compatible with this specification. Tidal, for reasons the company wouldn’t disclose, can only stream to Sonos at CD quality (16-bit/44.1kHz).
Spatial audio
I don’t want to confuse you: spatial audio and hi-res audio are different things. Hi-res refers to a bit-depth and sample rate for digital music that is higher than CD quality, while spatial audio is a 3D, immersive sound format. They aren’t mutually exclusive: You can get spatial audio in hi-res quality (though so far, no streaming services offer this).
So why am I bringing it up? Several Sonos speakers are compatible with both spatial audio and hi-res audio, specifically the Beam Gen 2, Arc, Arc Ultra, and Era 300. If you own any of these products, or can see yourself adding them to your system in the future, you may want to consider a music service that has both hi-res and spatial audio.
Technically, Amazon Music, Apple Music, and Tidal qualify. However, Tidal is once again the odd man out — you can’t stream spatial audio tracks in Dolby Atmos Music from Tidal to Sonos at the moment. Only Amazon Music and Apple Music can do that.
On-the-go
Finally, it’s worth reminding ourselves that (unless you’ve got money to burn), most of us don’t want to subscribe to multiple music services. We just want one that will be able to meet all of our needs, whether it’s listening at home on Sonos or listening on-the-go via a smartphone app.
On that note, a big part of selecting any music service is your satisfaction with the non-listening features. E.g. how does it handle music discovery? How easy is it to create, share, and collaborate on playlists? Is it easy to find what you’re looking for using the interface? How about things like lyrics and videos?
Does hi-res on Sonos matter?
This is going to seem super weird given that the whole point of this article has been around selecting a music service with hi-res audio, but hear me out.
Unlike spatial audio, which most people can immediately detect as being different from stereo when they hear it, hi-res audio is a different beast.
It’s designed to offer greater levels of detail than you can get from lossless CD-quality, which is great in theory — but can you hear it?
If you’ve got an audiophile-grade setup, with a high-end network music streamer, amplifier, and speakers, or if you’ve got the equivalent setup for headphones, perhaps you will hear the difference hi-res audio can make. Many people claim they can.
But if we’re being perfectly frank, as great as Sonos’ speakers are, they’re hardly of the spare-no-expense-in-the-pursuit-of-audio-purity variety. Which is to say, it’s absolutely worth listening to CD-quality music on these systems (instead of the lossy compressed sound you’ll get from Spotify or your old MP3s) … you just might not get much of an appreciable bump by going hi-res.
Try before you buy
Here’s my suggestion for this conundrum: Take advantage of the free trial period offered by each of the four hi-res services (including Tidal), and add them all to your Sonos system.
Spend the next few days doing your own A/B (or A/B/C/D) comparisons. It can be tricky knowing which tracks are hi-res as opposed to simply CD quality, so here’s a cheat sheet:
- In addition to adding all four services to Sonos, download their mobile apps to your phone.
- It’s not always obvious inside Sonos which tracks are hi-res, but the mobile apps are usually pretty good at identifying them.
- Inside each mobile app, create an identical playlist with some of your favorite tracks — the ones you already know really well — and make sure they’re at least 24-bit/44.1kHz or better. Add no more than 10 tracks to the playlist to keep it manageable.
- When you switch over to the Sonos app, you should be able to access these playlists within their respective services.
- Now create a new Sonos playlist and add each track from each service in the same sequence, e.g.:
- Amazon Music Track 1
- Apple Music Track 1
- Qobuz Track 1
- Tidal Track 1
- Amazon Music Track 2
- Apple Music Track 2 etc …
- You should have a Sonos playlist of 40 tracks when you’re done.
- Now here’s the fun part: Pick your best/favorite Sonos speaker and start the playlist. Listen to the first 20-30 seconds of each track, then skip forward and repeat.
- In theory, the first three versions of each song should sound better than the fourth, because the Tidal version will always be in CD quality. If you can’t hear a difference, you might not need to worry about using a hi-res audio service.
I say “in theory” because Sonos won’t always play a hi-res track in hi-res. I’m still looking into it, but some hi-res tracks appear to be getting downsampled to CD quality. I’ve seen it happen frequently on Apple Music and Qobuz, and on Amazon Music too, though of the three it’s the most reliable so far.
I’ll update this post once I learn more.