I’m posting this in the hope that it helps someone who may have been in a similar situation.  It’s also an extended letter of thanks to this community.  Without you guys, I’d probably still be cursing my Sonos setup every day.

Short version:  With the advice and guidance of this community I made three changes to my home networking and Sonos installation that turned my system from a hated disappointment back into the premium home music system I originally invested in.  HOWEVER:  These changes were expensive and required me to buy business-level networking products to meet Sonos’ demands.

Conclusions:

1:  Sonos has some work to do on its positioning and expectation management.  Yes, a three-player system will probably work out of the box in a consumer wi-fi environment.  No, a 15 player multi-generation, multi-room system probably won’t.

2:  This community is one of Sonos’ biggest assets.  Thank you.

Long version:

The background:

I’ve had Sonos in my house since the ZP100 was launched in the UK.  Since then, my system had grown to over 20 players including examples from every S2 compatible generation of player up to and including the Era’s.  My home Wi-Fi was OK – 1Gbps fibre to my home distributed via a reasonably premium consumer wi-fi router (a TP-Link Archer) rather than my ISP’s standard box.

And my Sonos system’s performance was terrible.  It routinely took 30s+ for players to sync at the start of a playlist.  I’d given up playing my library of FLAC music a long time ago.  Zones would regularly become unresponsive, disappear, refuse to change volume.

Today, I have the Sonos system I wanted.  It. Just. Works.  I play FLAC from my NAS with no delay and Qobuz works (almost) seamlessly.  I’m looking forward to lossless Spotify.  Creating, changing and managing groups of zones happens the way I always thought it should.

So, what did I do to fix this?

Firstly, what I did not do, is get any useful support from Sonos’ technical support line.  I’m so sorry to say this as the people I spoke to were courteous and seemed to care.  But what they were not was helpful.

What I did do is turn to this community and I made three changes on your advice that have returned my system to what I originally paid for.

First:  Put in a mesh wi-fi system.  Cost:  moderate.  Improvement:  marginal.

You guys told me that Sonos puts a big demand on the LAN at home with lots of player-to-player traffic.  A TP-Link Deco mesh wi-fi system made some small improvements but I was still left with all the original failures.  Just to a lesser extent.

Second:  Prune some of the older players from my system.  Cost:  substantial.  Improvement:  substantial.

I asked if you thought some of my performance problems might be down to players not being quite as seamlessly interoperable as Sonos would have us believe.  You gave me some suggestions and when I invested in some latest generation players for the most-used zones and, crucially, ditched the oldest players from my system the performance improvements were startling.  Almost back to what I expected but still with substantial lag when starting playlists and FLAC playback spotty at best.

Third:  Replaced my consumer router with a business router (TP-Link ER7206).  Cost:  Minor.  Improvement:  Spectacular.

This is the change that had me giggling with delight.  Starting and stopping FLAC playlists just because I could. Switching most of my playback to a combination of locally hosted FLAC and streamed Qobuz.  Gratuitously wandering from one room to another and watching the Android controller quickly pick the system back up again.

Of-course, my home is my home and yours will be different.  And I realise I’m in an extraordinarily fortunate position to be able to invest in some of these changes.  But if you find yourself in a similar position to me, other things haven’t worked, and you have the inclination and the resources to give some of these things a try, then I would hope that you may benefit too.