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What happens if I string an Ethernet cable between my stereo-paired PLAY:1s?

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28 replies

ratty
In many circumstances the wire between the pair will be used, with the player nearer to the BOOST making the wireless connection on behalf of both of them. For a simple pair (no grouping) this actually reduces wireless bandwidth demand by a factor of 3. Without the wire the stream would have to go BOOST->Left then Left->BOOST->Right.

I say 'in many circumstances' because there is a situation where the wire is ignored. This is where the STP root path costs for the two units in the pair differ by less than 10. The simplest way to check whether the wire is in use is to look at the Network Matrix at http://x.x.x.x:1400/support/review.

(The wire can be forced into use, in all cases, by disabling the radio on one of the pair. However this is an unsupported configuration.)

Note that in 'Standard Setup' the wire is useless as the Ethernet ports are disabled.
pwt
Userlevel 7
Badge +20
This is pretty much 100% curiosity, but a half-baked motivation is that if one of the speakers was communicating with the other over wired, that would be one fewer speaker soaking up WiFi bandwidth. I'll try it at some point. It will be interesting to see what the SonosNet mesh protocol makes of this configuration.
4 x P:5 | Sub | 4 x P:1 | 3 x Connect | 2 x Boost | Connect:Amp | 2 x One | Amp | Move | Port
S
Userlevel 5
Badge +11
I don't know the answer. If I had to guess, I wouldn't expect it to work that way.

I have a question for you though. Does this thought experiment have a practical application? It seems like pretty well every situation in which one can reach wireless and the second via a wired cable; the second is still going to be in range.

Your curiosity made me curious. 😃
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