I’ve had a few discussions with people here. We concluded that I had the wrong channels selected on my WiFi/Sonos system. Changing those helped a lot. Now I’m having issues with the three installation options. One solves the issues I have, but creates other ones. I have an Orbi AC3000 with 3 satellites. I have 21 Sonos Nodes powering 24 speakers (one is Amp with L/R/S). Three are BT capable (so no SonosNet).
My gold standard is being able to stream HDMI audio sources or a streaming song everywhere, hearing the first chord, and experiencing no drop outs.
The three options are:
- Amp plugged into Orbi Satellite Ethernet with WiFi on, generating SonosNet for all my speakers that are wireless. Several are plugged into Orbi (base or satellite) with wifi off. Audio plays 99% perfectly. Starts instantly, is smooth, adjustments are fast (volume, pause, seek). But, I see like 30% of my network requests fail. It’s like a request goes down a Sonos node and then just hang. So apps/stuff just are weiredly unreliable.
- Using Beam as SonosNet generator instead, which is plugged into Base Orbi. Then everything else is either wireless exclusively or plugged into Orbi with wifi off. This seems less damaging to network requests. Maybe because it’s plugged into Orbi base.
- Just doing the standard expected setup. Every speaker wireless and just one, Beam plugged into Orbi Base. Audio is atrociously bad. I played an Apple Music song and it took about 30 seconds for other nodes (except Beam plugged into Orbi Base).
When I rely on Orbi backhaul, it seems that the extra high speed wireless network helps. But I definitely see these loop back issues. If I get managed switches or create a VLAN, can I avoid all of them? I want Orbi to just work like I have it in #1 but not mess up my network.
