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Comment by dandare | Hacker News Reader

Sonos speakers have beautiful sound but the constant loss of connectivity is a nightmare. Just few days ago I had to reset the system once again and despite the fact that I am logged in none of my services and settings are remembered. I am very dissatisfied with Sonos and I will not buy any of their future products.

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I had never-ending problems, and it was always, "There's a network issue." These are speakers, and when I get home from work I'm an audiophile.

I do not want to hook PagerDuty up to my home audio system and manage it like my home is a NOC, thank you very much. I threw out my Play:1s, and my Play:5s are now connected by ethernet. They work just fine, but only in the one room of the house close enough to the router to run CAT5.

At some point, this arrangement will no longer be useful to me, and when it does, these speakers are on their way to landfill.

I get what Sonos were trying to do, but the experience felt like running a PC in the 1980s: Too much incidental complexity for an appliance.

I ditched Sonos's software as well, and firewalled the speakers off from phoning home. I play my audio through Airplay 2, and Life is Fine.

Do you have similar issues with streaming on other devices? What about video streams... I found that cutting the wifi channels to half their max (while reducing theoretical bandwidth) cleared up a LOT of the buffering issues in my home.

Also moving the main router higher, and/or more centrally located can help... if it's a really big home, strategic repeaters can help too.

What brand is your wifi? I’ve seen numerous reports of issues with UniFi and Sonos, so I went straight to wired. However it seems quite possible that other vendors could cause problems too. Ubiquiti forums and /r/‘s have ways around the issue, but I’d prefer wired so didn’t go there.

I'm 100% Ubiquiti and have not had any problems with my Sonos. I even have my Sonos across the house from my AP and it's fine.

I haven’t had problems either and I’m all UniF too. But as the Ubiquiti forums and reddit subs have numerous stories about problems, I wired them. It seems that wiring one can solve issues with them all. https://community.ui.com/questions/UniFi-STP-and-Sonos/7f72d...

Have you looked into ethernet over power?

Thank you for the suggestion.

Not yet, worried about adding on to a "jenga pile" of technology. But it'll certainly be worth a second look if I decide to move the speakers.

I was hesitant at first, but when I finally bit the bullet, it works. Yes, there can be issues due to age of wiring and what not, but the reality was, after I went with EOP, I didn't want to go back to WiFi. Yes, a hardline into your router is best, but EOP is a solid, worthwhile solution. I set it up once, and that was it. Never had to worry again.

Another option might be the coax cables laid for cable TV. They've been run everywhere in my last couple houses and worked much better than EOP.

I've used Actiontec and Netgear models at various times, but other people make them. MOCA is a standard and the different models work together fine.

Here's what I bought last. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B013J7OBUU/

These Motorola ones are new (since I bought mine) and look nice as well (and cheaper). https://www.amazon.com/Motorola-Adapter-Ethernet-2-Pack-MM10... or https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1389945-REG/motorola_...

I’ve never had those issues it sounds like your network has problems

Same here. I wish it was a little faster in changing configurations (I move some speakers around to different rooms and different pairings from time to time), but the last time I did so - it was faster/better than before.

For almost the first time, 2 days ago, my Sonos app could not find any of my Play1 speakers. It's great when you're about to feed the cats and think "let me throw on some music" and then spend 10 minutes troubleshooting something that should Just Work.

I ran around the house unplugging speakers, some of which are really inconvenient to do, just to reboot a bunch of them. I think what happened is the master (of course, you have no way of knowing which is the master) got wedged, and once i rebooted THAT one, a new master was selected, and all the rest fell into line.

Okay, fine.

But then it happened again yesterday.

And the speakers kept stuttering for the first 10 seconds of every new song, streaming from Spotify. On a gigabit FTTH connection with all ubiquiti APs that work flawlessly for every other client.

My other huge Sonos frustration was their choice to disable streaming-from-phone. To be fair, the feature was an absolute pile of gutter trash; it couldn't tolerate any latency whatsoever, so if you so much as moved your phone around the house during a podcast, it would drop the podcast and move to the next one, and half the time the scrubber didn't work so you had to start over from the beginning of a 2 hour podcast, etc. Their solution to this removed feature was to buy their AirPlay equipped Play1. Which is fine, but I already have all the Play1s I need. In theory, you only need to buy ONE of the new devices, but I guess that means that one's always the master? Or you have to do something to make SURE that one's always the master? I just don't really trust their model enough to throw more money at the problem and hope it solves it.

I probably got burned more than most because I really only bought the Play1s a year or two before they dropped this feature; I think that particular product was quite long in the tooth and it was pretty bad timing, but it left a bad taste in my mouth.

This might be the issue where Sonos devices uses their own network and your network thereby crafting network loops. Do you run STP? Is one Sonos device attached via Ethernet? A lot of Unifi users are experiencing problems with Sonos due to their mesh.

I was once responsible for an office network where on a semi-regular basis the entire network would collapse and become unusable. It took several days to work out that it collapsed when one particular user came into the office, and even longer to find that the Sonos iOS app does some STP magic which didn't cooperate with the cheap wireless router we were using.

Expensive systems have trouble too. Sonos makes a network within your network and this doesn’t necessarily fly with ones setting and config. Wiring it one seems to fix it.

I’ve run into a few situations in the last 6 years, all in the last year, where my system wasn’t detected and I needed to reboot a few speakers. However, I’ve never lost any settings or had any other issues.

I’m still worried they are going to force obsolescence on my older play5 and play1 speakers. I also wonder about how stable the company is, totally based on the clients not being native apps, which isn’t logical but I sometimes feel there’s a couple of audio engineers and a logistics guy with everything else outsourced.

I wonder what frequency range they're in. My Sonos systems have never given me that trouble. I'm guessing the difference is the kinds of local interference in their range.

Are you using SonosNet (so at least one device connected to ethernet) or connecting them to WiFi?

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