SonosNet is a Mystery

Also: Beam has no sub or surrounds, it has a Sub but it’s connected over Ethernet to the exact same 8-port switch.

It’s because their network settings are not stored in the Sonos App, they are actually stored on the speakers/hardware - switching the Move/Roam off before removing the wireless credentials was your mistake here - the Sonos App is a ‘remote’ and the settings you see are actually on each of your speakers/devices.

Okay, no I’m talking about the latency box (middle) not the headers.  I don’t even look at the noise values because they’re useless and not shown on new devices.  The latency from Beam to every speaker was green, until Boost took over and now some are yellow.  I’m messing with some things and while the totally as expected configuration doesn’t work very well either, I’m going to test out switching to my amp being the primary node because that’s the only device that has wireless speakers.  But yes having separate 2.4 Ghz and 5 ghz networks would be helpful.  Or I can use my Synology router wifi just temporarily and then turn it off.  All of these discussions are helping and I think pushing me in a direction of understanding the limitations and working within the capabilities of Sonos.

What is also helpful here, is to set your SonosNet channel in the Sonos App network settings to one that is not being used by your Orbi WiFi Hubs.

It’s not latency in the main matrix cells; it’s signal strength.

As for why a wireless node would choose to connect to the Boost rather than the Beam, it’s because that path offers the lower root path cost. The Beam’s own root path cost could be being increased by non-Sonos kit in the core of the network.

What makes it difficult is that everything can be running smoothly, all connected to Boost, etc. and then I unplug Boost and half the speaker vanish.  Never to return.  This is the main question that I think needs to be answered.  It’s like it has the hidden SSID and no other speakers do.

Is signal strength not factored in to `root path cost`?  When beam gets a 50-60+ inbound and outbound and Boost drops that to 30-40 that seems like quite a bit higher cost.

If you’re going to try and second-guess SonosNet’s topology computations it helps to have at least a basic understanding of STP.

OMG after changing both channels all of my devices switched over to the SonosNet device I wanted and not the crappy boost.  You, sir, and the 10 other people who told me to do so, deserve a fast clap.  I will keep messing with it.

For half a day now it has been working exactly as I wanted.  It seems like changing the channels of my Orbi and Sonos just made it instantly work.  Which is shocking.  But very awesome, and would explain why sometimes it worked better than others because Orbi was set to automatic.  Although prior to my full reset I did have Orbi pegged to a channel.  So not totally sure about what was breaking that earlier setup.

My high level setup is as follows:

Orbi AC3000 Base with 3 Orbi Satellites (I was an early adopter right when they got introduced, still awesome devices)

All router/DHCP is handled by an awesome Synology router.  All Sonos nodes (and just about everything else) has a reserved IP address in organized blocks.

Amp is plugged into an Orbi satellite and has wifi turned on, to broadcast the precious 5GHz signal to surrounds/sub and the 2.4GHz signal to everything else.  Rear Right has wifi turned on, Right Left/Sub have wifi turned off.  All 3 are plugged into a 5-port unmanaged switch.  Right Rear handles all the wireless traffic for all 3.  I also have a wired sub plugged into the amp.  Wired (coaxial) sub is in the front of the room and the wireless sub is in the rear of the room with the surrounds.

The other two Orbi Satellites each have a stereo pair connected directly with WiFi turned off.  Yes, the loop back issue is a huge issue if wifi isn’t disabled.  Orbi starts thinking it can use the Sonos as backhaul and some of that traffic gets blocked so random devices/requests fail.  Super intermittently bad.  Really would be cool if there was a way to prevent this issue, like making Sonos only support Sonos traffic.  But I’m still all good regardless.

My Orbi Router has a Beam and Sub plugged in (again wifi disabled).  This was previously my main Sonos, but I had to switch to amp because I do rely on wireless surrounds/sub there.

I also have a stereo pair not plugged into any switches, just connected together, with the physically closest speaker having wifi on and the other off.  In addition to 3 single One’s scattered around, of course on SonosNet with no Ethernet cable.  And 1 Move & 2 Roams.

I just prefer hardwired so much that whenever possible I want that handled by the 1.8Gbps Orbi backhaul and not the slower Orbi or Sonos wireless networks.  I thought one speaker would be too far to reach Amp but it’s even showing as green in the status table right now.

My test (since Sonos doesn’t do a single thing to inform users when there is drop out—they should log: 100ms audio dropped on Zone B) is to play an HDMI source everywhere, mute everything, then turn zones up to hear them in the distance and listen for any variation or drop outs.  I run this test frequently when I have everything setup to see if it’s stable and able to handle the challenging task of pushing realtime audios streams everywhere with approaching no drop outs.  Naturally the devices plugged into the Orbi backhaul are rock solid.

Sonos only supports 32 nodes max max, right?  So a few more little additions and I’ll be nearing the physical limit.  Besides, there are like 10 undefined entries, what are these?

I think I have 40mhz channel width.  What does this mean, that of 1/6/11 it spills over into an adjacent channel?  Should I use 1 and 11 only?  Things are so stable and reliable now I don’t want to touch a thing.

My rear right surround is bossy and likes handling communications for the throuple.

When a speaker cuts out 1ms I want to know because it means interference is building of I have a trash implementation.  I want excess bandwidth, capacity, whatever.  That’s why I spent these 50 hours messing with my system to finally have it physically communicating as I know is the most efficient with least network demand at every level.  Perhaps now it can handle anything I throw at it.  I hear the first chord everywhere now.

With 40MHz width, the Orbi on 11 will put its secondary channel on 7 so would stomp on SonosNet’s ch 6.

Either confine Orbi to 20MHz width (better solution) or use only chs 1 and 11 (worse solution as it continues to upset any neighbours who use ch 6).

40MHz at 2.4GHz is unsociable and should really never be used,