On The Verge Of Dumping All SONOS Product If I Can't Get Connection Issues Solved
At my wit's end here. Currently owns dozen PLAY1 speakers, a PLAY5 and a subwoofer—the latter two both second gen. (Also recently purchased a SONOS Boost to help problem-solve.)
Issues with these products used to be beyond minimal—but seems every SONOS-related app updates over the past year has worsened the overall experience, rendering the products absolutely useless.
Issues I'm dealing with are comparable to many others on here who have invested thousands of dollars into this system, but still don't have viable answers.
Breaking point was reached last week after spending hours going down the message board rabbit hole and dedicating IP addresses on my router to each piece of SONOS hardware in my home—going into my Arris router's LAN Settings, inputting the 12-digit MAC address as well as the dedicated IP.
Went through all steps of resetting my router, plugging in all devices one-by-one, et al— still in a nightmare situation. (Have also played the change-the-router channel game between 1, 6 and 11 and no combination there proved better than the previous)
For a party this weekend, I relied on my MacBook as somewhat of a hack. It's plugged into my home's Cat5—bypassing the need for songs to stream wirelessly. Even with that, the app was still insanely sluggish when attempting to change songs—and the process of importing my iTunes playlists into SONOS still wasn't seamless, as it cut off at the letter "Q", when I reached the max number for the importing process.
As I went further down the rabbit hole, I've found things about setting music up on a NAS drive and similar solutions (re: plugging hard drive with music into USB port of router, etc.)—further leading me to believe SONOS has an issue with this product (and app) that must be solved, as it shouldn't be this difficult to stream music at home.
All this to say, the juice is no longer worth the squeeze. Not sure what happened with the SONOS process or why things have become so complicated over the past year with the hardware / software issues—but I never would've invested this much money or time into a home audio solution that required a computer engineering degree.
BASED ON ALL OF THIS, what are my options to rectify this issue?
Would a better router help the cause? What about upgrading my Internet speed—which is currently the best option Cox Communication offers, outside of their new, highly-priced Internet Gigablast plan ($120-per month—up to 1 GBPS download / up to 35 MBPS upload speeds)? I've also found a local AV company that boasts a proper knowledge of SONOS home instillation; but have hesitated to call until I've tried to troubleshoot on my own. (In zero mood to invest another cent in this process right now.)
The amount of man-hours I've spent over the past decade creating playlists, ripping CDs to iTunes, downloading hi-res cover art, etc.—not to mention money invested in SONOS—and to STILL not be able to play music with ease ... officially ready to lose it, dump all this hardware, start with something new and go scorched earth on all things SONOS, advising all potential customers to beware of what is starting to feel like an inferior home audio solution.
All and any expert advice is appreciated. Thank you for your time.
Issues with these products used to be beyond minimal—but seems every SONOS-related app updates over the past year has worsened the overall experience, rendering the products absolutely useless.
Issues I'm dealing with are comparable to many others on here who have invested thousands of dollars into this system, but still don't have viable answers.
Breaking point was reached last week after spending hours going down the message board rabbit hole and dedicating IP addresses on my router to each piece of SONOS hardware in my home—going into my Arris router's LAN Settings, inputting the 12-digit MAC address as well as the dedicated IP.
Went through all steps of resetting my router, plugging in all devices one-by-one, et al— still in a nightmare situation. (Have also played the change-the-router channel game between 1, 6 and 11 and no combination there proved better than the previous)
For a party this weekend, I relied on my MacBook as somewhat of a hack. It's plugged into my home's Cat5—bypassing the need for songs to stream wirelessly. Even with that, the app was still insanely sluggish when attempting to change songs—and the process of importing my iTunes playlists into SONOS still wasn't seamless, as it cut off at the letter "Q", when I reached the max number for the importing process.
As I went further down the rabbit hole, I've found things about setting music up on a NAS drive and similar solutions (re: plugging hard drive with music into USB port of router, etc.)—further leading me to believe SONOS has an issue with this product (and app) that must be solved, as it shouldn't be this difficult to stream music at home.
All this to say, the juice is no longer worth the squeeze. Not sure what happened with the SONOS process or why things have become so complicated over the past year with the hardware / software issues—but I never would've invested this much money or time into a home audio solution that required a computer engineering degree.
BASED ON ALL OF THIS, what are my options to rectify this issue?
Would a better router help the cause? What about upgrading my Internet speed—which is currently the best option Cox Communication offers, outside of their new, highly-priced Internet Gigablast plan ($120-per month—up to 1 GBPS download / up to 35 MBPS upload speeds)? I've also found a local AV company that boasts a proper knowledge of SONOS home instillation; but have hesitated to call until I've tried to troubleshoot on my own. (In zero mood to invest another cent in this process right now.)
The amount of man-hours I've spent over the past decade creating playlists, ripping CDs to iTunes, downloading hi-res cover art, etc.—not to mention money invested in SONOS—and to STILL not be able to play music with ease ... officially ready to lose it, dump all this hardware, start with something new and go scorched earth on all things SONOS, advising all potential customers to beware of what is starting to feel like an inferior home audio solution.
All and any expert advice is appreciated. Thank you for your time.