Comment by DelaneyM | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DelaneyM | Hacker News Reader

I am an experienced engineer with twenty five years of infrastructure and protocol development, and my experience setting up an all-Sonos home system is a _saga_ of epic proportions.

Unbelievably frustrating software decisions for otherwise excellent hardware. My favourite(?) part is the “Sonos net” independent network which takes over when one speaker in a group is connected via Ethernet, taking the rest off wifi silently and creating a dedicated wireless network. Then when you connect Ethernet to another speaker in the same group it loses its shit silently, creating and destroying new wifi private networks in an unending cycle, without any notification or visibility in the app. And speakers on a Sonos Net network announce and are discovered differently than spec, which adds a hop and breaks any other subnet connections in a way which is _very _ hard to debug.

And that’s just the setup. My partner and kids use them strictly as airplay targets, and refuse to use the app or voice assistant because of the UX and bugs.

If I didn’t have 5k sunk into the hardware already I wouldn’t touch it with a ten foot pole.

I bought a Sub Mini just last week and it took me about 3.5 hours to get it working.

First, I plugged it in via ethernet and my entire network went down. The second I unplugged it, it worked again. Unifi have a dedicated help link in their UI that's displayed next to any Sonos products. I followed the instructions on Unifi's website, made a few ethernet cables for my wireless speakers, disabled WiFi on everything, and it no longer broke. Progress.

Then I tried to adopt it to my system with my Google Pixel and the app hung. I repeatedly tried, both ethernet and WiFi, no joy. Called the helpline and was walked through factory resetting and tried many more times. It just hung at "Adding Sub Mini...".

After a long slog I gave up. I borrowed my dad's iPad the following day and it worked first time.

The entire process was opaque,I had no idea why it failed. Had I not already invested I wouldn't buy any more - and definitely won't recommend.

But I watched Close Encounters of the Third Kind last night and it sounded pretty amazing.

> Unifi have a dedicated help link in their UI that's displayed next to any Sonos products

This is horrifying and hilarious at the same time.

Here's the page. The wired approach worked perfectly for me. Sonos's own networking features seem to introduce infinite loops when mixing wired and WiFi.

https://help.ui.com/hc/en-us/articles/18930473041047-Best-Pr...

The fact that this page exists and the suggestion is to connect your wireless devices physically to avoid weird networking loops is astounding. I assume wireless sonos gear does not come with an Ethernet patch cable, right?

Fair play to Unify for making this page in the first place, and making it easy to find for their users. It clearly and rightfully shifts the blame to the right party.

But wow. How many other examples are there of one org's incompetence leading to unnecessary support load for other companies and they have little choice but to provide the workarounds and fixes themselves.

The worst part is not all Sonos devices come with an ethernet port and only the supported dongle works - it costs £40!

> I assume wireless sonos gear does not come with an Ethernet patch cable, right?

Only recently, but yes.

They used to, though. I have sixteen Sonos players of varying vintage, from the ZP90 to an Arc and almost everything in between, and of those only the Roam and the Move (portable by design) were supplied without network cables. Even the sub-woofers can be plugged in. However I’ve just checked the spec of the recently launched Era 100/300 models - not portable - and indeed, they lack even a built-in interface. Ethernet dongle costs extra. I’m chalking that up as yet another “screw you” from Sonos’s product management to its customers.

> Had I not already invested I wouldn't buy any more

And that's how they get you.

Makes me wonder if the horrible setup process is intentional to emotionally lock you in. Once you get it working, you don't want that effort to be for nothing.

Unrelated, but similarly, I am in a weird form of hell in the Nest/Google Home ecosystem, where trying to re-add a camera to my home fails because it cannot successfully connect with the "assisting device" in my home to fetch the wifi credentials from.

When you attempt to connect it to a _new_/unrelated structure/home, it connects fine, because the phone sends that information to the camera directly. When you try to add it to your existing Nest home, it attempts to be "helpful" by connecting it with an "assisting device," and invariably fails.

It fails with an arcane NC013 or NC024 error, and instead of falling back to a manual setup option, it just... cannot be added. They legitimately suggest that you add it to a new "structure" (which operates under a separate Nest Aware subscription), and then migrate all of the other devices over to the new structure. Which isn't reasonable, when I have a dozen of these things, some of which are mounted in very out of the way places.

And worse, it can still fail, randomly.

It's as if the "Nest network" becomes corrupted in some indecipherable way. This was exacerbated by Google murdering dead my Nest Secure alarm system, which was _also_ an assisting device, which took my locks offline. And when they shipped a Nest Connect wifi adapter, I _also_ couldn't onboard _that_ device to the home for the same reason, so I now have a separate structure called "Connect", which features... just my locks. And now, the camera I was trying to add back.

It's absolute unforced errors and complete madness.

My experience building out a Sonos system for onboarding wasn't too bad, but I have had Sonos Amps fall offline and do weird things, and it personally annoys me that TruePlay doesn't work on Android. This shift to a new app that doesn't hit parity, and seems to do the original things the S2 app did markedly worse... woof.

I’ve also burned my Google system.

In my case, I use a Google Apps email account so my family has a shared email domain (and I can better handle tech support and manage my kids’ use). That’s slowly become completely incompatible with nest and any consumer hardware or services, and that process of integration degradation was incredibly frustrating.

Google consumer software/hardware is dead to me now, I just can’t use it even if I weren’t holding a grudge.

Though it still has warts and opportunities for improvement, our house mostly runs on Unifi (for networking and security cameras.)

IMO the only chance for redemption here is opening up the devices to open source projects.

It’s good hardware, just let us use it.

(Also please ship a PoE++ adapter.)

Bingo. Bang on.

I have a network of them around the house. Incredible sound quality for the price, but the setup experience was utterly terrible.

Thankfully, I can just use AirPlay day-to-day, so I don't really need to deal with the software too often, but I prey it continues to work so I don't have to.

If it starts to break down? Honestly, I'd just pull the trigger and replace the entire thing. I hate the software that much.

They form a tunnel mesh over that private “Sonosnet” wireless network and each player announces an internal bridge interface via STP, including over any regular wifi they’ve joined and any fixed wire network they’re connected to. That could be fine if it was contained to their private mesh, but it isn’t. Worse, they do it with pre-rSTP weights. Consequently electing their own low-bandwidth wireless mesh tunnels as a forwarding path in any nontrivial switched network. If they’re plugged into a hierarchy of unmanaged/non-STP-enabled switches, this will also form a forwarding loop. Either way, they get congested and start to flap, spewing endless topology change BPDUs, and now your network is kaput.

Despite wanting to act as an active layer 2 device there is almost no configurability, management, or monitoring available. A couple of years ago, in a spectacular product management insult, Sonos also intentionally removed much of the built-in port 1400 interface that provided device-level insight such as log messages revealing this misbehaviour.

The solution is to treat them like hostile guests and shove all Sonos players into a wholly private broadcast domain just for them, to avoid fucking up the rest of your network. And don’t let them join your regular SSIDs.

I am almost certain that there is no-one left at Sonos who understands their own network stack.

Compounding all this is a general smug attitude of “our customers are idiots” which is pervasively apparent from the CEO, through their product management, to their frontline support staff. If this fiasco tanks the company, it’s ultimately due to their own shitty, arrogant culture.

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