My understanding was that the blind tests were not as naive as that and the comparisons were with full 16/44 recordings and playback.
Funny enough I have read that article on xiph.org - which is a good read - and was completely convinced.
But listening to guys like this https://youtu.be/geaoEt-9V-w has made me question this. He claims that in practice it is impossible to perfectly band-limit a signal (whether with digital or analog filters) and this gives rise to artifacts in the reproduced signal which can be observed by oscilloscope. And yes the guy seems to know what he's talking about but I'm happy to be corrected on that.
Having said all that, I've little interest in the top-end audio market so it's somewhat irrelevant to my needs. Support for hi-res audio is pretty down my list of irritations with the Sonos, to be honest.
Oh jeez, not that guy. He's a former hifi salesman, with only a very tenuous grasp of the technical details. I've experienced this countless of times, the salespeople completely buy into the "high end" mumbo-jumbo and don't bother to actually learn the technical aspects.
It's very common for them to show some minor effect on an oscilloscope, but ignore the fact that any artifacts from ringing and such would be close to the Nyquist frequency and below -80dBFS in the signal. In other words, utterly inaudible. For all their talk about trusting their ears, they seem to conveniently forget that maxim the moment it doesn't suit their made-up arguments.
Yes, in theory you cannot 100% perfectly band limit a signal. However, in practice you can band limit it well enough that any artifacts are either very close to or actually below the noise floor, and thus completely irrelevant.
On the complete opposite end of the scale of salesperson:tech guru, the article I linked was written by none other than Chris "Monty" Montgomery (xiphmont on this very site), who among other things founded the Xiph.org free codec foundation, and either was fully responsible for creating the Ogg container format, the Vorbis, FLAC, Speex and Opus audio formats, and countless other technical achievements, or at least had a big hand in them. Free and open digital audio owes a gigantic debt to him, and if anyone knows their way around digital audio, it's him.
Funny enough I have read that article on xiph.org - which is a good read - and was completely convinced.
But listening to guys like this https://youtu.be/geaoEt-9V-w has made me question this. He claims that in practice it is impossible to perfectly band-limit a signal (whether with digital or analog filters) and this gives rise to artifacts in the reproduced signal which can be observed by oscilloscope. And yes the guy seems to know what he's talking about but I'm happy to be corrected on that.
Having said all that, I've little interest in the top-end audio market so it's somewhat irrelevant to my needs. Support for hi-res audio is pretty down my list of irritations with the Sonos, to be honest.