Comment by tasty_freeze
6 years ago
About 8(?) years ago my wife tasked me to get a whole-house audio system that was simple to use. After reading a lot, sonos was the clear choice, though pricey. We started with two play:3's, then added a play:5 and two more play:3's. And things were good.
But for the past year the system has been a mess. Music stutters, some units can't be found, some units fail to upgrade through multiple retries/reboots. I've wasted so many hours relocating them and connecting the misbehaving units to an ethernet cable trying to get them to update.
Eventually things get working again after hours of blind tinkering, but then a month or two later it happens again.
My wife looks to me as the tech guy to solve it, but it is far more opaque to debug then when PCs misbehave. Yes, I know about the secret diag menus and login, but they don't really help me.
The point is: my wife resents that the system doesn't work, and I resent that I've wasted so much time and my wife thinks I'm shirking because every time it comes up I groan and put off the pain of getting it working again.
I won't brick these -- I'll find some use case where they do work, but I'll get some other system to make my wife happy, even if it means spending another $1200+.
Honestly, it sounds like you have some kind of local 2.4 GHz interference problem. Try unplugging unnecessary wireless devices or moving them well out of range while troubleshooting, don't run microwave ovens until you've ruled them out, and keep your phones and other gadgets well away from the affected hardware. See if you can make friends with someone who owns a spectrum analyzer.
Before when I said I had spent hours trying to debug this, I did exactly that. Turned off every single wifi device in the house, turning off every printer, phone, and the ring doorbell. I tried bringing up one sonos device at a time to figure to figure out if one of them was causing problems.
Also, I used wifiman on my android phone to sniff out other networks. Finally, I am lucky enough to live on 3.5 acres so there aren't any nearby wifi access points.
Anyway, another comment has pointed me to the apparent solution: the sonos bridge device apparently is not essential -- just connecting one of the speakers via a wired connection makes it the bridge for the sonos network.
Okay, I’ll throw my hat into the unsolicited troubleshooting advice ring— I had similar problems and it ended up being that the Sonos Bridge is no longer supported. Once I removed the Bridge from my system and plugged a Play:5 directly into the network, all the weird issues you described that I too was having resolved themselves. YMMV.
Thank you! It has been only a few minutes, but it seems to be working better (but I've said that before too!).
I had no idea that the bridge was not necessary. I seem to recall that when I bought the first sonos unit I had to buy the bridge too.
Honestly, sounds like you need a better wireless router or need to add a (few) repeater(s).
Sonos speakers form an ad-hoc mesh network. Although I know that I get > 50 Mbps to every spot in my house where there is a speaker, it shouldn't matter. If the router to sonos #1 gets a signal, as long as sonos #2 is in range of sonos #1, sonos #2 should be served even if it can't see the router.
And if you do this, be aware of the Unifi V Sonos thing. I just ran Ethernet to avoid such problems.
Alexa or Google Home speakers make amazing (synced) whole-house audio systems that are surprisingly affordable.
Besides that fact, yeah it sounds like you have some wifi issues instead and is blaming Sonos.