Sonos Issues

We’ve used Sonos around the house for 6 or 7 years now, and until this week had no issues to speak of. All that changed this week when one of my direct neighbours moved ISP and received a new router. Unfortunately it also co-incided with me getting some new demo network kit.

The problem began with small breaks in audio playback, then longer breaks, then playing 30 seconds and stopping. To me it seemed like there was a looped network connection somewhere. I checked the logs on my core switch, there were a ton of Spanning Tree Protocol errors which also backed up my theory of a looped cable. I couldnt recall moving any network cables, except to plug in the new devices.

2 hours later and a lot of head-shaking and all 66 connected network cables checked for loops and nothing.

A quick call to Meraki tech support and they couldn’t see any issues except for the STP errors. A downgrade to stock firmware rather than the beta that I’d been running and still no solution.

Time to call Sonos, who don’t publish a UK support number (0800 026 1526) on their website, but if you ask for it via twitter a reply comes within minutes, i’m very impressed with their support via Twitter thus-far. 

After several diagnostics being run, the helpful Dan came to the conclusion that it was probably a wireless issue. After a quick scan from one of the access points, it was clear the wireless channels in the local area are heavily over-used.

We moved the Sonos wifi channel to every available (1,6 and 11) and every channel gave the same interference issue. One important point to note is it takes about 20 minutes to move the wifi channel and all the devices to start talking again. I was losing patience with trying to get it working with wifi, luckily we have CAT5 points in all but one location the Sonos devices are located, so I switched over to network cabled Sonos. When I bought my second Sonos (I think it was a Play:5) I made the mistake of plugging both devices in and caused all sorts of issues with my network. The good news these days is that it doesn’t matter how many devices you plug in, they can work both ways.

Whilst on the phone to Sonos, Dan gave me some details of a diagnostics page embedded within the Sonos speakers, which shows connection information, the below screenshot shows where we’re at now, with mostly green connections. Yesterday morning using wireless the same screen was a sea of red!

The URL for the diagnostics page is http://ipaddress:1400/support/review there is a whole host of other information you can see, but i’ve not looked at that yet. I figure i’ve spent enough time on the problem.

Oh and the oddest of things i’ve also noticed. The Sonos devices can all be controlled by the Loxone, I was expecting to have to re-program with new IP addresses for the devices. I didn’t have to, oddly enough it would appear wireless and wired cards in the Sonos use the same mac address, I don’t know how this works but will be investigating this soon.