Sonos to Amp - is simplicity better?

I have tried this experiment both ways and to my ears having the Sonos drive my amps was merely adequate. The best I can say is that the Sonos produced background music, nothing I could sit with and get fully engaged. To me the sound was thin, gritty, and 1 dimensional if that makes sense. There was no texture and depth. Running it through a DAC helped a lot. I intend to also add the Empirical Audio Synchro Mesh to help reduce jitter. I love the Sonos interface and ease of use though.

I've decided - without even doing the test - to do two things:

1. I'm going to buy the Emotiva XDA-2 DAC, and
2. I'm also going to send one ZP90 to Wyred-4-Sound for modification. I want the digital out on the ZP90 to upsample to 24/96.

The DAC will feed a Conrad Johnson PV-15 -> CJ MF-2500A -> Paradigm Studio 100s.

The system is coming along nicely in the design phase, and I thank the OP and everyone else in this thread for their input & findings.

Cheers,
Z

I have a similar question, I have new nad pre pro setup driving polk audio rti a9 towers, zp90 is main musical source, I have actually been given a nad d1050 dac to test as I know the rep, luckily, .. Will sonos and it's output limitations affect the final result and as the last user posted, if he had his output converted to 24/96 is this possible if the base file getting to sonos is initially limited by its software?

Depends on the component you are adding. There are many preamps that really don't sound that great but if you find the right one, then you can have magic.

I heard a shootout of some very expensive DACs where, at least for part of the shootout, a Sonos streamer was used as the source feeding the DACs. You could easily hear the differences between the DACS, so the Sonos is certainly good enough that other components matter and can improve the sound.