Putting Curtains in the Man-Cave

We were looking over the end of year reports from the RIAA and others, and one thing is clear - the traditional CD album - is in decline, and streaming services are on the rise.  We have been on the tip of that wave - being longtime subscribers to Pandora, Spotify, and others - and are happy with them.  The one thing that has stopped them for being anything other than a casual/background listen is the compressed nature always fell short of spinning a CD, or even playing a FLAC file for musical enjoyment.  The holy grail, in our book, would be a high resolution streaming service (preferably something on the order of 24/96) that could give us a reliable, high quality sound that wouldn't sound like a compromise for convenience's sake. But streaming services c2013 weren't there.  Even at the highest offered rate of 320kbps, there was a small amount of lost ambience and detail compared to a silver disc spun in our CD player (not to even broach the subject of an LP whic...

At the risk of having my audiophile card revoked, let me extol some virtues about a system that "gets it," for family audio - whole house audio - but even more importantly as a portal for music discovery. Can I tell you that the Sonos sounds great (we currently own a Play:5 , Sub , and 2 Connects ), and is simple enough that everyone in the family enjoys it?  Once you attach a few services to it (Spotify, MOG, Pandora) that people listen to and discover more music than you'd expect.  We have had so much fun over the last year that I believe our music-awareness kicked it up a notch. In fact we're splitting this into 2 parts - part 1 (this one) describing in big hand-waves, the system, and the next one (part 2) when you unleash a family with a history of practical jokes upon Sonos with every family member in the household having a remote control for it .... Has it replaced the main system? No. Could it?  No way. Does it sound great? Yes. What's my major b...