Niche Sonos wifi issues?

6 months ago I got Mesh wifi set up in my house – it’s a big house, so I use 3 TP-Link Deco’s with wired backhaul. And I’ve got about 6 Sonos dotted through the house running on the Mesh – and mostly they’re OK, the occasional dropout but generally fairly reliable.

In the last 10 days, the Sonos Connect in the kitchen has been absolutely unable to hold the wifi signal. It’s connected to the nearest Deco, both the Sonos app and Deco app say it’s got a strong wifi signal; but it’ll play for about 30s and then just drop out, disconnect and reconnect. Nothing’s been moved or changed, and all the other Sonos are still running fine.

Anyone have any ideas wtf is going on with it? I’ve posted on the Sonos community boards as well, but so far no responses

When I first got the Sonos system I had to tweak the WiFi channel. Discussed a lot in their forums.

Not sure if it’s connected to the most recent horrific app update they’ve released but my mate was having constant connection problems with his Sonos system. Got him to turn off the WiFi extender he’d recently setup and to only connect to his main router. Problem completely solved and be has no issues now.

I had random drop outs with my Connect in my bedroom (it was all pre the app update shenanigans) and had support try and fix it a few times. They tweaked my WiFi settings (even though it was plugged in over ethernet!) and nothing helped. It would play fine for days and then be totally unusable.

I swapped my lounge Port up to the bedroom and it fixed it instantly, so there it stayed and a new Port was bought for the lounge. Not a cheap solution, even with my 30% upgrade credit, but an easy fix in the end! I assumed my Connect was either broken or something in the newest updates weren’t playing nice with it. Airplay in the bedroom is a bonus too.

My connect is also the only one to regularly drop out for no good reason. It’s pretty old so I don’t know if it’s in line to be dropped from support…if they still do that sort of thing. Rubbish if that’s the case though.

Are your Sonos devices close enough together to form their own mesh. And is one of them close enough to either the router or one of the mesh nodes to hardwire to it? That’s how I’ve got mine setup – soundbar hardwired to a node with a lan cable and the rest then form a mesh around the soundbar (like a mesh, they don’t all have to be within range of the soundbar, as long as they are in range of another Sonos devices that is in range of the soundbar. And it does not have to be the soundbar – any Sonos devices that has a LAN input will do.)

And what am I not meant to like about the latest app?

Yeah, one play 1 is next to and plugged straight into to the router. Everything else is fine. Just the connect playing up.

Have you gone onto your Deco app and rescanned ‘Network Optimisation’? If not, it might be worth a try.

New app update is dog poo and wont work on my  wifi settings VPN ect

I haven’t had an issue with my system since the app update – 100% seamless.

App update was sh1tty for me – I had a single zone plus another Sonos in the bedroom, app constantly defaulted to the bedroom one making it basically impossible to control the main zone. I’ve turned off the bedroom for now.

Checked the App store reviews for the app and every one for the week before my issues was a one star, various issues but clearly the latest update is a total lemon.

So, OP, I can’t really help other than do what I’m doing, which is cross my fingers that they fix it so I can turn the bedroom on again.

I’m close to giving up since the app update, as well as one of our units just giving up randomly a couple of months ago. Sonos is a great concept and has worked well on the whole for us for a few years, but I find when it doesn’t work it’s the most frustrating experience.

Just on the app – I’ve had to reset my system once, it’s very draggy thinking about turning which ever feature on, I basically only listen to radio stations but there’s a lot of hate on the forums for loss of playlists etc – seems like they’d barely tested it before rolling out

App update…..

Can’t control volume with phone buttons unless the app is active

No queue, well there is but it’s not editable and there is no play next/add to end

No ‘browse artist’ from what’s playing

Every other time you open it ‘something went wrong ‘

Lots of stuff now takes 2 clicks instead of 1

But the new home screen is better

The obviously rushed it out for the headphones, which I would buy except they don’t support my play base, because why? Let me guess, software?

It’s great hardware but they can’t do software for whatever reason

We seem to be running fine here. Only 4 units. 2x 1s as a pair and 2x symphonisk in two rooms.

The new app however isnt as nice and experience. Seems to take a while to change pages and quite a while to open new podcasts (via BBC sounds)

Wow, some good feedback and helpful pointers here, thank you! More so than on Sonos’s own forums.

Are your Sonos devices close enough together to form their own mesh. And is one of them close enough to either the router or one of the mesh nodes to hardwire to it?

Good question, short answer is no because of the shape of the house and the location of ethernet sockets. None of them are hardwired, which I believe means they should be working on the wifi rather than the Sonos network.

Have you gone onto your Deco app and rescanned ‘Network Optimisation’? If not, it might be worth a try.

Great point, will do! And I wonder if it might be the specific Deco node that’s the problem, so I’ll swap them round too.

I rolled back the Sonos app to the old version when it became clear the new app wouldn’t consistently allow me to use my Music Library. But both the old and new app seem to have this problem.

Interesting to hear it’s not just me struggling with the Connect though. Sonos have awful form for ditching support for specific products, so I really wouldn’t put it past them! The Port isn’t cheap though, so can’t see myself upgrading for a little while yet…

I’d try rebooting the deco’s , and in the app settings for the connect specify which deco it should connect to and which network 2.4 or 5. see if that helps.

Casting to Sonos from Tidal seems to be broken for me, can see but can’t connect to the players, was working fine but slightly flakily before the update.

I can retrieve tidal from the Sonos app, but I don’t want to.

This sounds a bit like I’ve had previously with an older zone player. Sonos basically said the memory had degraded to the point where it couldn’t “host” the overall network for Sonos. It seems your overall system picks a node tp host the overall system. If it chooses something quite old in relation, your whole system goes tits up. Especially when linking speakers.

A replacement Port instead of a zone player did fox the problem, but I was raging at the time.

I’ve noticed (minor) day to day performance improvements across my bunch of Sonos One SLs since I hardwired my Sonos Beam. There was also always one room that worked fine 9 times out of 10 but would then totally fail to connect leading to extreme frustration, I found that rebooting the mesh (as suggested above) tended to solve that but this also hasn’t happened since wiring the Beam.

In short, in my experience anyway it’s worth adjusting things so that you can hardwire at least one of them if possible. If not, try rebooting the mesh (I think you can even set it to do this automatically overnight daily, weekly etc. in the app).

It’s great hardware but they can’t do software for whatever reason

Just for balance I’ll say that the new software is working just fine for me across two systems in two houses.

Thanks everyone for the pointers and guidance! Switching the Deco nodes around hasn’t made a difference, so it’s not the local mesh node was screwed. And rebooting the network and node hasn’t made much difference.

Latest experiment is putting a Play:3 alongside the Connect to see if the 3 can hold the wifi signal. It’s been 10 minutes and the 3 is doing fine, while the Connect has dropped out. and when it drops it’s so thoroughly dropped that it has to be added to the Sonos app as a “new” product

Fat-boy-fatFull Member
This sounds a bit like I’ve had previously with an older zone player. Sonos basically said the memory had degraded to the point where it couldn’t “host” the overall network for Sonos. It seems your overall system picks a node tp host the overall system. If it chooses something quite old in relation, your whole system goes tits up. Especially when linking speakers.

A replacement Port instead of a zone player did fox the problem, but I was raging at the time.

This sounds worryingly like what might be happening to me! I had a quick look at the price of Ports and frankly I’m raging that I might have to splurge on one…

ETA: there’s a long-running thread on the Sonos Community that suggests this isn’t a lone occurrence… https://en.community.sonos.com/components-and-architectural-228999/sonos-is-forcing-people-to-buy-new-hardware-as-they-ve-broken-the-connect-amp-and-they-refuse-to-fix-it-6888610/index11.html

Huh, so a long-quoted answer is to downgrade the Connect to the Sonos S1 app (the old legacy one). Except in order to do that, you have to connect to it in the new app, and select “downgrade to S1″…. which has been removed from the latest Sonos app.

You have to say about Sonos – good hardware, pretty shonky software, and a truly terrible approach to users. “F you all, your old products are now obsolete, buy more from us!”