Long story short: we have two apartments in the same building, at different ends of the building, one on the ground floor, the other on the second floor. They’re separated by at least 100 feet. In the past, the Sonos devices in one apartment could not reach the ones in the other. Each apartment had its own internet, and we essentially had two entirely separate Sonos systems. Clunky and expensive.

So we got an Orbi mesh system to bind the two apartments together. Works great overall, and we were able to cancel the second internet service. But once we tried to set up zones in Sonos, we started having problems.

We currently have two zones: upstairs and downstairs. None of the Sonos devices are hard-wired to anything, and the upstairs zone is far enough away from downstairs that the Sonos devices upstairs can’t reach the others using their internal mesh. So the ones upstairs talk to each other over internal mesh, and the ones downstairs do the same in their zone, but any attempt to use zones together causes big problems.

Presumably the internal mesh channels within each zone get confused when they’re also being asked to use the Orbi channel for inter-zone communications. Seems to me the solution is to turn off Sonos’s internal mesh and just use Orbi for everything, thereby resolving the conflicts. But I haven’t figured out how to do that. Anyone have any thoughts?

Thanks very much.