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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.
Stanley_4 — Will they respond to diagnostics numbers and related-info there?
Question, did you try unplugging all products, then adding one, playing and test, then add another, play and test, then another, and on and on until you recreated the problem? So many ways to isolate the issues doing this. As soon as you start getting the problem back, then start unplugging the first unit you plugged in, then the second, listen for issues. You may be able to isolate the unit or two units not meshing well. Usually you can troubleshoot the problem unit/area this pretty quickly.



Borrow a friend's android device and connect to the sonos wifi directly using sonosnet. (settings advanced, enable sonosnet wifi - or something like that) Apple products do not work as well for troubleshooting issues with sonos (and in rest of life!)
CBello305, in answer to your question, yes, the people who are on the Twitter and Facebook areas have the same access to your diagnostics, as they are Sonos employees.
As said, they are staffed by Sonos tech that have access, probably about the same as the forum and e-mail support folks, but I don't have any inside info.



The only real different method from what I have seen are the phone lines, folks get redirected from here to there for a lot of issues, replacements, real-time diagnostics, assistance in music library setup, odd moises and likely other stuff I don't recall.



When I have a problem the phones are my go-to method, hold times can be bad but sometimes you can get a call-back offer that is worth taking.
After replacing a router one should shut down EVERYTHING on the network and reboot. One function of a router is similar to "take a number" when entering a building. Clients are known by that number as long as they are in the building. Unfortunately, there is no general notice sent out to the clients when a router is replaced. The current clients retain their original IP address ("number"). There is lots of potential for mischief. If the new addresses are from a different block, the original clients will be stranded. If the same block of IP address is reused, there may be duplicates. You can imagine the spats that can result -- "Mine", "Where's my order", "I didn't order that", and on and on. A device might be sleeping when the router is replaced and the network will seemingly be OK. Days later, however, this device might come online and create a duplicate. A further complication is that IP addresses are rented and must be "renewed" periodically. The renewal IP address may or may not be the same as the original. This renewal process allows the possibility that duplicate IP addresses may work out naturally on their own after a period of days. This can be a source of frustration because the system seems to heal by "magic".



The reboot essentially throws everyone out of the building and new IP addresses are given out as the clients return.



Address "reservation" in the router establishes a table of clients that have been given VIP status and they will always be assigned (exclusively) the same IP address. Of course, if the router is replaced, the reservations are lost.
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