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Comment by cm2187 | Hacker News Reader

To be honest I had a pretty average experience with Sonos so far. It is connected with cat6 ethernet, professional switches, with no other connectivity problems on that network (and I tested all cables). I have 3 systems (pay1, play 5 and the sonos amp), and they keep losing track of each others, I have to regroup them regularly. They also struggle with long music tracks (i.e. 1h podcasts off a synology shared drive) and often stall in the middle.

If they brick my devices, I will only be half upset.

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If the units are also wifi connected (sonos mesh networking), then either only plug in one of them to ethernet, or fiddle with your switch spanning tree cost values. As I recall, sonos uses the older standard spanning tree values, and until I fiddled with my managed switch settings, the sonos were regularly bringing down my local network, and/or winning the elections so that large amounts of my lan traffic went over their wireless mesh network.

Pretty crappy default configuration on Sonos' part (using old default cost values), if you ask me.

^ I worked in Sonos support for 7 years and going wired for everything is the best configuration - if you're still having issues with that then spanning tree configuration is the likely cause.

I found Sonos support to be super helpful. First time I've talked with a support representative where I came away impressed with how knowledgeable they were.

Best thing to do in most situations is unplug everything, disable SonosNet, use ordinary WiFi.

I eventually ripped out my custom switch configs and went with a single Sonos unit hard wired, and the rest on SonosNet/Mesh. I use only 5ghz wifi (2.4ghz disabled) at home, and since Sonos only does 2.4ghz wifi, this was the best solution for me.

No I never configured the wireless setup, I wired them to ethernet straight away.

They self configure into a wireless network called sonosnet if they are wired together.

Indeed. There is a way[1] to connect to the individual sonos units and disable the radio entirely, but that certainly isn't the default.

[1]: https://bsteiner.info/articles/disabling-sonos-wifi

It's not just not the default. It's actually hard to find. You can't do that from the Sonos applications.

I agree. It seems pretty bonkers, but I'm sure some PM thought it would be great for some subset of customers to just be able to plug things in and have things "magically work". Anything beyond the most basic network though, and it really causes problems.

How do I switch that off then? I don't see any option in the windows sonos app's settings. I just see a Advanced Settings/General/Wireless Setup but that's to connect it to a wifi, which I do not want to do.

Turn off the wireless interfaces.

Instructions I followed which solved everything: https://bsteiner.info/articles/disabling-sonos-wifi

Sonos's spanning tree implementation is problematic (and anachronistic: last I looked, it was using classic STP not RSTP). In a similar situation I've watched them flap away merrily, spitting constant topology change BPDUs at each other through both interfaces. It's not a pretty sight.

They seem to me to be totally in denial about it, judging by their forums. Lots of blame-the-customer and blame-someone-else's-device, and very little (or no) technical documentation. I think they are a speaker manufacturer first, a streaming audio interface second, and a networking company a very distant third.

Interesting, why does Sonos need to run Spanning Tree over wifi if they use their own proprietary network(SonosNet) for inter device communication?

I bought a LibraTone [0] and love the thing. With its inbuilt battery, it's a portable hifi system. You can take it anywhere. Sound quality is 5*. Integrates seamlessly with all Apple devices.

[0] https://www.libratone.com/

I'll definitely check it out. Thanks for the link.

I have 2 Play 1's, Play 5 and Play Soundbar. They have worked fantastically and I've never had a problem once in several years. The idea that they can be bricked has me extremely upset right now.

5 Play:1s and they all work flawlessly on WiFi. It doesn't seem they're intended to work wired, from what I've seen.

I've had one tiny but annoying bug: Occasionally a podcast will show 0:00 to 0:00 on the scrubber and nothing -- not rebooting the whole system and my phone -- will fix it. It can be frustrating to be unable to scrub to the 40 minute mark on a podcast where I've already listened to half of it.

The devices don't persist groups across reboot, so if they power-cycle (which can happen if they update), you have to regroup everything.

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