Help from the pro’s needed...🙏
11 Speaker Sonos System - Becomes Unresponsive After a While (Sky Max + Orbi RBE871 AP Mode)
I’m hoping someone can point me in the right direction because I’m running out of ideas.
My client has an 11-speaker Sonos system consisting of:
- Beam
- Sonos Amps
- Play:3s
- Sonos Ones
- Roam
For over 6 months they’ve experienced intermittent issues including:
- Rooms disappearing
- “Unable to connect”
- “Cannot communicate”
- App timing out
- Speakers appearing in the app but with no playback controls
- Alexa playing to the wrong room or saying it’s playing when nothing happens
Original Network
I discovered the network was configured like this:
- Sky Max Hub (routing + Wi-Fi enabled)
- Orbi RBE871 mesh (Router Mode + Wi-Fi enabled)
So there were effectively two routers and two Wi-Fi systems.
Changes Made
I spent the day simplifying everything:
- Sky Max Hub now does all routing and DHCP.
- Sky Wi-Fi disabled.
- Orbi RBE871 changed to AP Mode.
- Garden Orbi also changed to AP Mode.
- Garden Sonos speaker moved into the same Sonos household as the rest of the house.
- Reserved almost every Sonos IP on the Sky router except Beam that would not reserve IP?)
General Internet performance is excellent and all devices receive correct 192.168.0.x addresses.
Behaviour
Initially everything appeared much better.
However, after a short while (or after leaving the house and returning), some or most speakers become unresponsive.
The strange thing is:
- All speakers still appear under Settings > About My System.
- Music services are still visible.
- Playback controls disappear.
- Trying to start new music often fails with “Unable to connect” or similar.
Interestingly:
- Previously playing speakers often continue playing.
- Sometimes pressing the Play button on the physical speaker starts playback, even though the app cannot control it.
- If I go into the Devices screen at the bottom of the app, the speakers that were already playing often still respond.
- It seems to be starting new playback or controlling speakers that fails.
One particularly odd observation was that during one failure, the only speaker that responded was actually the one with the weakest Wi-Fi signal.
Sonos Support
I spent around two hours on the phone with Sonos Support.
They looked at diagnostics and suggested changing the Orbi 2.4GHz channel from 1 to 6 due to network congestion.
Immediately afterwards every speaker appeared to work.
I ended the call, walked outside to the van for a few minutes, returned to demonstrate everything was working… and almost the entire system had stopped responding again.
The behaviour was identical on both my phone and the client’s phone, so it doesn’t appear to be controller-specific.
Current Thoughts
At this point I’m wondering whether this could be related to:
- SSDP/mDNS discovery
- Multicast handling
- Sky Max Hub behaviour
- IPv6
- Orbi AP Mode
- Or something else entirely
General Internet access remains stable throughout.
I should also mention that before changing the network topology, the client’s main complaint was that when he walked between rooms, the Sonos app often took a long time to reconnect or would lose communication with the speakers.
One thing that keeps standing out is that every time I reboot the network, or make a network change, the Sonos system appears to work properly again for a while before gradually becoming unresponsive.
Has anyone experienced similar issues with Sky Max Hub + Orbi RBE871 in AP Mode + Sonos?
Before I return next week I’m compiling a checklist of things to try, including:
- Wiring one Sonos player as a test.
- Disabling IPv6.
- Checking WPA2/WPA3 security settings.
- Looking into multicast/IGMP settings.
Any advice or similar experiences would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks.
