Best method to setup at Office with enterprise switches/routers?

  • 1 November 2018
  • 1 reply
  • 637 views

Hi all,

My boss has a Sonos system here at the office and another at home. It works great at his house, at the office...not so much.

I would say once a week or so the whole system disconnects, it won't play music at all, the music cuts out, groups are disbanded, etc. Just all sorts of problems. He came to me today and is tired of it, he wants to look at getting a wired speaker setup. I've worked with phone support each time it goes down and they always get it back up, but it's a lot of time that I could be working on other things (I am only part time here). Plus I know he is frustrated.

My reason for this topic is, I am upgrading the wireless AP's this weekend and thought it might be a good chance to redo the whole Sonos setup with what I think I've learned from my multiple calls with phone support. I told him to wait until I make changes to see if it improves before making a decision on a new system.

Here is our equipment.
We have an ISP managed Cisco ASA-5516X firewall/router.
That connects into a Cisco SG200-50 switch and in a star topology connects into 5 other SG200-50 switches
For Sonos, there are maybe 6 Play:5's and 6 Play:1's
Previously 90% of the speakers were wired with just a few Play:1's that were added after the wiring was done that are wireless.
The new AP's I am installing this weekend are a 8 Ubiquity UAP-AC-Pro
Lastly, we have multiple VLAN subnets setup for 1 Corporate equipment, 2 staff phones, 3 guest wireless, and maybe one other, it's slipping my mind now.

Now on my most recent call with support, I was told to actually remove the wired connections from most speakers to make it majority wireless. I also don't know which speakers are connected to which switch because I didn't think it matter, but on one call I was told to put them all in the same switch.

So this is getting long, my point is, if I were to set it up from scratch this weekend, what would be the ideal setup?

Thanks!

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1 reply

We're in a similar situation; we have 20+ speakers on a dedicated network and they are constantly dropping out of groups. Network connectivity is fine; it doesn't matter if we have them wired or wireless, they just don't consistently stay in groups.

Wireless, we're using Ubiquiti UAP-AC-PRO units as well as the Mesh APs. I've put the speakers / wireless SSID on their own VLAN as well so there's no clashing traffic, but it just won't stay up.

We've tried third party controllers (SonoAir and AudioBridge) to stream the audio as well but they too drop out. We're at the point where we are either thinking of getting one of the new AirPlay 2 enabled speakers and trying to control it all through that or simply giving up on the lot.