Avid Contributor I

Need Home WiFi + Hardwired with NO SonosNet

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I have had a few forum discussions ongoing. Short summary is that SonosNet doesn’t work for me because playing an Apple Music song everywhere (9 zones over ~21 nodes) just crumbles. Totally unusable. When I use home wifi mode, music plays great but HDMI live sources are unusable.

There really needs to be a setting to forcefully disable SonosNet. When I use a hybrid approach with some devices plugged into Ethernet and wifi on, the system always switches back to SonosNet. The problem is, to take one example, my Amp. It pushes live audio sources out to other zones, but has to do a minimum of 2 hops. Once to Orbi over home wifi, and then again to the other speaker. If not a third hop over the wireless backhaul. This makes no sense at all. Why can’t Amp push its data out over Ethernet and avoid the first slow/unnecessary hop?

Or if SonosNet mesh could interoperate with a mesh WiFi system without making the network unstable, that would work too. I’m bringing this up because I still don’t have a satisfactory system configuration. Some kind of hybrid approach between the two would allow for both needs to work properly.

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benn600Author

Avid Contributor I

Hey, it’s me. I’m back! So I watched the Era Q&A session. It doesn’t support SonosNet! So all my pleading and begging and being told I’m crazy for trying to forcefully cancel SonosNet. Sonos is doing it finally!

Well I moved and now have over 4,500 square feet of space (not including exterior). Yeah, SonosNet laughably crumbles on the size and configuration of my floor plan. I also added a few more speakers (28 total I think now). I need a few more but am holding off until I can get everything to work reliably.

It seems like the way to forcefully disable SonosNet, and get every speaker to connect to my Orbi mesh Wi-Fi is to ensure that every device plugged into Ethernet does NOT have Wi-Fi on (yes, plugged into Satellites too!). Which funny enough, Era speakers do this AUTOMATICALLY. So what I was doing manually over and over is finally the brand standard/norm. I can’t tell if this is creating problems or not, I still occasionally get lost packets/connectivity issues to one of my 5 Philips Hue bridges or other devices. Or only see some speakers while standing near certain Orbi nodes. Really weird. But definitely not as serious as it was with SonosNet going in parallel to my mesh network. It seems when SonosNet is destroyed, then it isn’t really a “mesh” anymore. It just lets regular network requests route per routing mechanisms.

But yeah, they said it in the Q&A. Modern Wi-Fi networks are fantastic if you get a good system. And yeah, I can play a song on several rooms at once and it start at the same moment (hear the first chord), with volume changes very quickly executing and almost in sync with every room. That’s the holy grail that has been unattainable. Oh, and I barely have any other people/networks nearby so no more claiming network interference lol.

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