Controller & Router Reset

Hi. There is no harm done in resetting a controller. You haven't factory reset any speakers have you?

What device is your controller app on? What Sonos speakers do you have?

And you haven't tried to set up as a new system?

I have the Beam, sub woofer, One (2nd ed). The only reser was through the controller app. However. I did try it as a new system setup.

I have the Beam, sub woofer, One (2nd ed). The only reser was through the controller app. However. I did try it as a new system setup.
It sounds very much to me like you may have gone about things in the wrong way and possibly overwritten your original Settings with the creation of a new Sonos Household, now with all devices running on SonosNet wired mode...

I presume you factory reset the one wired speaker at some point, accidentally, or otherwise?

Did you by chance leave any of your original speakers powered off, when you had your speaker cabled to the network and chose the controller option to ‘create a new Sonos system’? If any were powered off, there’s a chance of recovering your old setup. Otherwise the old setup may be lost already.

Ken, it appears that if I am going to screw this up, i am not going to stop half way. The answer to your question is no. They were left on.

It acts like it is in the old setup, when I try to pair it to the router, speaker, and phone. The app cannot detect the speaker when it is attempting pair after i press the button.

Perhaps try this ..

Power off all speakers, just to begin with.

Connect a speaker (that you have not reset) to your router with an Ethernet cable and power it on.

Meanwhile, reset your mobile Sonos controller App and choose to “connect to existing network”. Do not “create a new network”.

Now check you have all your installed music services, favourites, playlists etc. showing on the “My Sonos Tab”... then come back here and tell us the outcome of that small test.

If if you don’t see your old playlists or music services, then you could try cabling a different speaker until you do see them. If they do not show then it’s every chance you may have overwritten the speakers already with a new system/household.

If you can kindly let me know the outcome of the above, I will explain what you then need to do next.

By the way there is nothing to 'pair to your router' ... don’t press any of the buttons on your speakers. It’s not necessary to do that at all.

Thank you. It will be a bit as I ax m on the road.

Ah okay, I will assume all worked as mentioned above and here is what you need to do next.

Power on your next nearest Sonos speaker, not cabled to your router this time. It may try to connect to your old WiFi, but then it will look for the SonosNet signal being broadcast by your first cabled speaker... it should connect to it and then show up in your Sonos App (existing network). If it doesn’t, power it off and just set it aside for now.

Do the same with your next nearest and the next nearest speakers and get as many as you can connected to your first cabled speaker that’s running your existing Household setup.

If there are any speakers that fail to connect to the existing original Sonos Household, they may be tried again by powering them on, but if they continue to fail to connect to the wired speaker and do not appear in the Sonos App, then you may need to factory reset them, but that can be done at a later stage, if you prefer to do that.

Having got to this point, with as many speakers setup as far as practicable, you next need to goto “Settings/Advanced Settings/Wireless Setup” and reset your 2.4ghz WiFi credentials and follow the onscreen instructions and enter your NEW WiFi credentials (SSID/Password). Please note they are case sensitive.

The new WiFi credentials will then be passed and stored by the Sonos players that you have setup in the Sonos controller. Give it a few seconds to do that.

You can now uncable the first main speaker from the router and all will now run on your new routers WiFi signal.

Any failed Sonos devices can now be factory reset and added back to your system using the “Add Player or Sub” feature in the Sonos App Settings. They will get the new WiFi credentials during setup.

Hope that helps to get you back up and running.

Adding some background to Ken's instructions:

When a SONOS system is first setup a unique "Household ID" is established. All of the units in the system will share this ID. System details, such as Household ID, music service registrations, SONOS Playlists, WiFi password (if any), and the music library index are stored in each player. Nothing is stored in the controllers. Also stored in the player is some detailed diagnostic data that can be submitted to SONOS for analysis by SONOS staff. The diagnostic data is valuable when tracking down networking issues. Factory Reset will clear all of this information from a player.

Although a Factory Reset might accidentally (temporarily) work around a networking issue, it will almost never fix fundamental problems. This is why we recommend that users not Factory Reset unless asked to do so by SONOS staff or a very experienced user.

When replacing the router one should shut down EVERYTHING on the network, setup the new router, then restart in the following order:

Router
Network switches (if any)
Access points (if any)
Wired SONOS units (if any)
Wireless SONOS units (if any)
NAS (if any)
Everything else

Wait for each step to complete before moving to the next step.

Now, you should "reserve" or "fix" the IP addresses for all regular network clients (SONOS, computers, pads/phones, thermostats, etc.) in the router. Reservations will minimize the risk of future network issues.

I know that this is a lot of work, but it is actually a time saver over the long term because it prevents some very vexing issues. Yes, I know that there are individuals who claim to have successfully replaced routers 100 times in a row and never reset anything. When the roof falls on 101, they'll claim that something broke because "never happened before". It's similar to the gamblers' fallacy. Even though one flipped an honest coin and came up heads 100 times in a row, it's still 50/50 for 101.

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servantleader,

In your case, if at least one of your players has not been Factory Reset, it will contain all of your system information. You could rebuild your system by removing power from all units except this one unit, then wire it to your router. For the purpose of this discussion we'll call this the "Master" unit, but in reality the units are co-equals. Now you can power up the other units, one by one, and test if they join the Master. If a unit joins the Master, move on to the next unit. It doesn't matter if this newly powered unit remains powered or not. If a unit does not join the Master and it has been Factory Reset, simply add the unit as a new arrival. If a unit does not immediately join the Master, you can Factory Reset this unit once, and add it as a new arrival. Repeated Factory Reset of a unit is pointless because there could be a hardware issue.and you'll need to work with SONOS support.

The SONOS system is very stable. Before I learned how the system worked, I went through multiple Factory Resets and setting my system up from scratch after each reset. In reality I was having network issues. Since resolving the network issues, I have not needed to Factory Reset the system -- that was in 2005.