Sonos 300 issues

Your details don’t make any sense. Why can’t the Era speakers be connected to your WiFi? Why can’t they be connected directly to your router, at least temporarily? Why has your mother been resolved, and what does she have to do with your Sonos system? Can you describe a bit more which mesh system you have, and what particular router is in use? How are / is your CONNECT and Sub connected to your LAN?

Sorry typo. I meant to say matter has not been resolved. The eras have been connected by WiFi to the router. But as I said previously the music breaks off. In essence the system is unstable and the internet breaks up. I do not have this problem with any other part of my system. I have a Linksys router. The sub and connect are both connected to it as are the other products. 

I would have expected the Eras to be better than the Play:1’s on wifi. Might they be on SonosNet rather than wifi? 
Can you try the Eras  elsewhere temporarily to see if there might be poor wifi where they’re located currently? 
Are you operating a mesh network?

I don’t understand what you mean by “the internet breaks up”.

I agree that I would have expected them to be better. I think the problem is that the teckies at Sonos decided in their wisdom to take the 300s away from the perfectly working mesh system. All my other devices work brilliantly with one play 1 plugged into the router by Ethernet.

As regards the other post maybe I am not explaining myself well but the music breaks up. In addition I tend to lose internet signal with the 300s. My app telling me that I have no WiFi. After a little while it comes back. But not exactly something I would have expected with a kit at this price. 
 

I can only conclude that the 300s are only designed for streaming music only. I wish I knew this before I had spent a lot of money on them. 
 

Last Sonos purchase I will be making. 

If the Play:1 is plugged into the router, it’s by definition not using wifi. So comparing its wifi performance with that of the Eras is impossible. 

Are you using SonosNet?

If you have a mesh wifi system, are they channel hopping? The Era could connect to the mesh, then the channel changes and it takes a few moments for the Era to find it on the new channel. Setting the mesh to a fixed channel should cure that. Use a different channel to SonosNet (it sounds like the rest of the system is on that), choosing one of channels 1, 6 or 11.

You might not notice the same “stutter” effect with, say, a printer on the wifi because the demands for streaming a continuous sequence of data that you hear as music is far greater than a few packets of data for a print file. 

Hi Nic. Many thanks for that post. I haven’t a clue how to reset channels and do not know whether I am on Sonosnet. I am afraid I am not much of geek when it comes to these things. Also this was not mentioned when I rang the so called called teck team. 

Just checked my settings and I am on Sonosnet channel 6 if that helps. 

Is it therefore possible to get the 300s on the existing mesh system. That would be great if that could work. 

Sadly: no. The Eras are not compatible with SonosNet. 
I see two options. First, you give us details of your router and we try to guide you through settings to try to get it better configured. Secondly, you buy the Sonos adapter and connect the Era via Ethernet like your Play:1 is hard-wired. 
 

I did suggest, in an earlier post, that you temporarily tried the Eras in a different location to see if that improved performance on wifi. Have you tried that? What happened?

Thanks Nik. The adapter arrangement won’t work as the speakers are in another room and I can’t move the router. I don’t really want to move the speakers to another room as the music system is already in my office and having the 300s in another room won’t work. I am nervous about tampering with the router as the rest of my system which includes full surround and play 5 works fine.  I think I am just going to have to flog the 300s on eBay. Sad as they sound terrific. 

My suggestion was to temporarily try the Eras elsewhere. All that needs is unplug them, carry them somewhere, plug them in again and wait a few minutes whilst they power up. It’ll tell us if the current location is in a slight wifi dead spot. That might give ideas for a fix. 

 

Thank Nic. I will give it a try. But they do connect in the room I have them currently. It’s just that the connection tends to break up. 

To be clear - the mesh system you mention is Sonosnet, not your own WiFi, right?

WiFi performance varies inch by inch in three dimensions. This is why you should experiment with physical location when there are issues.

@Oldprogger:

We need some data about your network hardware. The default settings of some hardware will frustrate playing music. Some network hardware keeps changing the wireless channel. Initially, this seems like a good idea because the access point can use the optimal channel (at the moment). However, this forces SONOS to constantly chase the WiFi. As mentioned in other replies above, if printer data or web browsing is delayed for a few tens of milliseconds while the device finds the new WiFi channel, this is hardly noticed by the user, however, music is devastated.

We should always be open to learning. While I’ve been more deeply involved in networking technology than you, I learned something new yesterday while struggling to resolve an issue (not related to SONOS). There was a firmware issue created if the user held the reset button longer than necessary and this inflection point was not well defined in the documentation. Recovery was obscure. I struggled with this for a few attempts until I stumbled over some documentation. If I encounter this in the future, all that is required is downloading a file from the manufacturer’s website (finding the right file can be frustrating), then a few seconds later … fixed permanently.

Thanks for all the comments. I have come to the conclusion that I need to sell the 300’s. They are great as a wireless speaker to listen to streamed music but if you want to use them in conjunction with other products and listen to music on cd or vinyl then forget it. I would love to know why Sonos chose to do away with a perfectly workable mesh system when it comes to the 300. 

I use paired Era 300’s in one room. I group them with a Gen 2 Play:5 in another room, and/or with a home theatre setup in another room. I also group it with a One. All of these configurations work just fine. The other speakers are on SonosNet, created by the home theatre setup. 
Sonos “chose to do away with” SonosNet because-despite your current experience- wifi networks are far more robust and reliable than they were when sonosNet was first introduced. 
But, we can’t force you to try things so I hope you get a good price for speakers when you sell them. It seems a shame though: you acknowledge how good they sound but you seem inflexible in trying to integrate them with your system. 

Sorry to hear that you will be selling your Era 300’s. Just for the record…

• I have a WiFi Mesh network consisting of three (3) Asus routers that are wired together via Ethernet backhaul
• I have a stereo pair of Era 300’s with sub
• I have a turntable connected to a Sonos Amp with 3rd party speakers and Sonos Sub
• I can send Turntable audio to the previously mentioned Era 300 stereo pair with no problem 

To clear up some of your terminology the Wi-Fi signal generated by your router is not the internet. Your router carries the internet path to other devices that can access the internet (such as a Laptop computer) via the Wi-Fi signal it generates .

The Era 300’s only need the internet for music streaming and updates. Music generated by your turntable or played from a device with stored music is only relying upon your routers Wi-Fi signal to carry the music to the Era 300’s. 

All said whether you are streaming music from an internet source such as Spotify; or internally via your turntable, it’s your router that is dropping the signal. Internal and external wireless interference can cause problems with Wi-Fi. 

You might try this…

• Unplug all your Sonos speakers
• Remove any Ethernet cable connecting a Sonos product to your router
• Delete the Sonos app from your device
• Reboot your router and let it come back
• Reboot your device and update its software if needed
• Plug in your Sonos speakers one by one and let each come back (do not connect any Sonos product to your router)
• Download and reinstall the Sonos app and select “Join an existing system”
• You will have to sign-in to Sonos with your credentials
• Hopefully, you will see all your Sonos speakers

“Turn it off and turn it on again”? 

Via Line-In from the Connect? Try increasing the Line-In Audio Delay on the Connect. https://support.sonos.com/en-gb/article/adjust-line-in-settings

If the Compression was ever switched to Uncompressed on the old app then set it to Automatic. https://support.sonos.com/en-gb/article/adjust-line-in-audio-compression

SonosNet is very slow compared to modern networks. The wired ports are 10/100. Modern ports are mostly 1000 and faster. On a practical basis SonosNet might run in the 30Mbps range. More typically speed is in the 10Mbps (mileage always varies) range. On modern networks I regularly see 800-850Mbps speeds with the WiFi connection to the Internet.

Hardware modification of older SONOS players would be required in order to support modern WiFi and the slower older hardware probably could not keep up. Since modern WiFi is much more capable, SONOS decided that continued support of classic SonosNet is no longer a good allocation of resources. As a practical matter a given system with mixed SonosNet and WiFi only units, one may need to try both and go with the best performance.

My understanding is SonosNet v2 can be compared to 802.11g, SonosNet v1 is equivalent to 802.11b, and most WiFi these days are substantially faster than either of those two ancient network standards. 

The OP's Connect is wired and the Eras are on WiFi.