How to set up Sonos on a Tenda Mesh system (with or without a Boost)

I have tried this and wherever I place the Boost wirelessly I still get dropouts. I have settled on wiring the Dining Room Left by ethernet and moving the wireless Boost about, but the Boost doesn’t seem to be contributing much, and I’m still getting dropouts.

Could it be a faulty Boost perhaps?

 

No. As I remarked here, the wireless Boost is deemed to be unnecessary because the signal strengths without it are okay. Sonos won’t use an intermediate node as a relay unless it has to.

Given the look of your matrix there don’t appear to be any major problems. That said, interference can come and go.

When you suffer from dropouts is this when grouped? If so what’s the structure of the group (which is the first room)? Does everything stop, or just selected rooms?

I have been trying to get music throughout all the rooms. Maybe that is a step too far? I am now experimenting with 2 groups of 2 - Kitchen & Hallway is one, Dining Room & Living Room the other. I’ll give that a try, running each group separately.

Normally when it drops out all of the rooms stop.

If all the rooms stop, and specifically the Dining Room (L) unit when Dining Room is the first room in the group, then it sounds like a problem outside the Sonos system. 

Pay attention to the environment. Some microwave ovens, baby monitors and video cameras can cause issues when operating. If you are unlucky, you’ll not catch any of this in the Network Matrix. If you have any ZigBee devices, this article may help.

Since we cannot rule out some sort of intermittent hardware issue, experiment with swapping the wired player, swap physically if necessary. For example, physically swap the Dining Room speakers and re-assign L/R in their pairing, wiring the left speaker. You can also power down a room for a while and test the system. If the system works without that room, suspicion mounts for a hardware issue there or a nearby significant interference source. Since your Network Matrix is so clean, I suspect that you live in a relatively sparse area and neighbors are not an issue.

Are PING times consistently reasonable for devices on your network?

An update: I have disconnected all of the potential sources of interference (security cameras, cordless phone, Google Minis, Smart Plugs etc.) and that seems to make no difference. A look at local WiFi shows nothing untoward (and with such thick walls it seems unlikely that they would penetrate to any degree).

I’ve changed the wireless channel from 1 to 11 (no change) and I’m now in the process of trying Buzz’s suggestion of switching speakers around to see if that highlights anything.

Latency does very here, as our internet cones by overhead cable from the cabinet about 1 mile away. Today it has been around 28ms, but sometimes goes as high as 170 ms. Internet speed is not great - around 10-11 Mbps (because the fibre only runs as far as the cabinet and is overhead line from there.

I will keep you posted!

As I remarked before, if a single wired Sonos player doesn’t perform perfectly then, barring hardware issues, the problem is outside the Sonos system. It could be in the external internet connection, or the local network that leads up to the wired Sonos unit. Or even with the streaming service itself.

The same would be true for a wired player which is the ‘Group Coordinator’, with other rooms added to it.

Maybe I missed something -- what is the source of your music?

Mostly I am playing FLAC files from an external hard drive on my PC.