Sonos Replacement? | Hacker News Reader

Sonos Replacement?

5 pointsrwfilice8 comments

We've had a Sonos system for about 2 years now - a Bridge component and 2 Play speakers. When it works, it's great - but it frequently stops playing or doesn't start at all - in short it's very buggy and completely unreliable.

What does HN use for this type of wireless music playing? We'd like to be able to play our music from a NAS and internet radio/Spotify/Pandora.

If anyone has advice on making Sonos work - here are the things I've tried: - 2 different routers (an old Netgear router, currently Apple Airport Extreme) - manually setting channels for the router and Sonos - trying multiple Airport 802.11 options (standard, only n, only b/g, etc etc) - forcing compression of the Sonos music stream - moving the various Sonos components around in an attempt to reduce interference - changed Sonos DNS to OpenDNS (recommended by Sonos support) - numerous complete Sonos resets - numerous Sonos component reboots - 15-20 calls to Sonos support with many diagnostics submitted and (obviously) no resolution

Are you using a Mac? If you get an Airport Express, you can use Airplay[1][2] and just plug in some speakers.

[1] http://help.pandora.com/customer/portal/articles/24294-using...

[2] http://support.spotify.com/us/learn-more/faq/#!/article/Stre...

Thanks for the suggestion - and I've considered this - but from what I can tell you can't reliably sync more than one speaker using Airplay? I'd like to sync between more than one room if possible.

For what it's worth, my Sonos bridge and Play:5 barely worked on the Airport Extreme. I switched over to a new Linksys router and it works pretty well now - and the Windows desktop app even works (it didn't before). I have my music library hooked up to the Windows app via a network share.

The biggest issue is still when a component powers down, you still need to search for it again.

Thanks - this is interesting. We switched to the Airport thinking that might improve things because our old Netgear router is really old - but maybe I'll try switching back or try a Linksys or something.

Oh man, thank you for this thread, I had heard only good things about the new play bar, and was going to purchase one this week...I guess not now.

Talk to other people - I think some people are really happy - but I can't personally recommend Sonos at all...

+1 on Sonos being unreliable. Even when I turn mine off it has to go through the whole "searching for a component" process.

I've had several Sonos components for years. They have worked flawlessly for me.

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