It might have something to do with your router:

Thanks for your reply but i am not using the wifi on the router as I have a Ubiquiti managed wifi network. 

What format is the NAS music, and where is the NAS connected? 

As an experiment it would be worth wiring one Sonos device to the switch, waiting 5 minutes for the system to flip to SonosNet mode, and testing with Amazon again.

Hi @Stuart_17 

Thanks for your post.

Please try the following steps on your UniFi configuration application:

• Log into the UniFi controller.
• In the Settings tab, click Wireless Networks.
• Click Edit next to the network SSID.
• Expand Advanced Options.
• Uncheck Block LAN to WLAN Multicast and Broadcast Data.
• In the Settings tab, click Sites.
• Disable Auto-Optimize Network.

I also recommend changing your APs to all broadcast on one channel - Sonos uses the channel your WiFi is on for direct speaker-to-speaker connections and when this channel differs from AP to AP, it can cause problems.

I then recommend you experiment with putting different rooms in charge of your large group - the centrality and environment of a particular unit can make it the best choice of speaker to be in charge of a group.

If, however, it doesn’t seem to matter which room is in charge (selected first when creating the group and listed first in it) then I can only recommend you try reducing the size of the group to improve matters, as you may be saturating the 2.4GHz link with all the distributing of the feed your system is doing, especially with higher bitrates.

As @ratty suggested, you can also try wiring Sonos to ethernet, though considering the size of your system and the group you’re using, I recommend you ethernet-wire 3 or more devices, as well spread throughout your home as possible - 3 wired units in one location will probably be worse than one, and you will need more than one connection. We generally recommend one wired connection for every 5 speakers in a group, but as Amazon HD needs more bandwidth, you may need more than this 5:1 ratio. Letting Sonos use it’s own mesh will ensure only “music traffic” is used on that WiFi channel (put SonosNet on the channel that UniFi is no longer using after the steps taken above: Settings » System » Network » Change SonosNet Channel).

If the music on your NAS is mp3 or m4a (or other lossy formats), then this is all likely due to the increased bitrate of Amazon HD, as you suspected. I’d expect FLAC or ALAC files on your NAS to produce the same results as Amazon HD.

I hope this helps.

@Corry P Thanks.

I had already made most of those Unifi changes.  I have now set all the APs to the same channel and will give it try at that before making any more changes.

Cheers

Stuart

I am having the same issues as well. I AM running my sonos off of wifi, but have never had any issues until I was made to upgrade to Amazon HD. Sirius, Pandora and all other apps works fine, but when I switch to Amazon HD, various speakers go in and out and its unlistenable. I upgraded from the Bridge to a Boost thinking that would help and it didnt. I even moved the Boost to a more central location thinking that would help and to no avail. Sucks because Amazon was our go to with the Alexa and playing a specific song. Now we have to solely use Sirius.

Hi @BarryHurley 

HD playback requires more from your network by dint of what it is - it uses at least 4 times as much bandwidth.

I recommend you get in touch with our technical support team, who have tools at their disposal that will allow them to give you advice specific to your Sonos system and what it reports.

Corry, 

     Thank you for the response.  I read another response you left further up and it gave me some suggestions to try.  All in all, we have (7 Sonos Products) 6 Sonos 1’s and 1 Sonos Move playing at the same time in 1 group so that may be part of the problem.  First thing I will try is to make 2 groups, 1 for upstairs and 1 for downstairs and see if that helps.  I have also tried your suggestion of making a more central speaker the “master” speaker and sometimes that helps, but only for so long.  We’ve never had a problem until my Amazon acct forced me to go to HD.  I didn’t realize it until last night that that was the main cause.  I had been avoiding it since I knew it wouldn’t make much of a diff in my listening experience and also having had problems with other “upgrades”.  If it aint broke, why fix it, right?

Hi @BarryHurley 

Glad to be of help!

Generally, either an ethernet-wired speaker, or one that has the best connection to your router (the least range/interference/signal-blocked-by-mass-in-the-way) is the best choice for a group coordinator. With HD content, 2 groups or more may be the way to go (or just a smaller group). Unfortunately, the only way to be sure you’re getting the absolute best performance available to you is to call technical support.

To be honest, you’d need very good (and probably well trained) hearing to be able to tell the difference between 320kbps lossy formats and lossless ones, not to mention a quiet environment. This doesn’t hold true once the bitrate falls below 256 or 192kbps. I remember when mp3s were first a thing and most were at 128kbps. High hats sounded like they were underwater due to the fact that it’s difficult - nay, impossible - to accurately describe high, irregular frequencies without high bitrates.

As for 16 bit vs 24 bit, it’s best to not even mention these on this forum due to all the arguments you’ll cause .

It’s my opinion that any difference you are able to perceive will soon diminish due to perception editing performed by your brain, just like with curved TVs - you’ll notice at first, and literally 20 seconds later your brain has forgotten the difference and just watches the movie (for curved screens this has been proven with electroencephalogram scans done on people while watching various screen types). You’ll notice curved screens have all but disappeared? I wouldn’t be surprised if similar experiments have been done with lossy/lossless music playback with identical results. As an illustration, have you ever noticed when something (TV, music, whatever) suddenly goes quiet and you can now hear fan noise from a PC or similar? That noise was there whole time, but is only now noticeable and maybe even annoying. I guess 100 billion neurons do a better job than pretty much anything else you can imagine...with those same 100 billion neurons.

@Corry P I have just downgraded my Amazon HD subscription back to a standard subscription as it would appear that my large Sonos network was not able to cope with the larger files.

I don’t have the option to ethernet wire any of my speakers (let alone three of them) so I couldn’t try SonoNet.  This is the reason I invested heavily in a good managed wireless LAN (Ubiquiti).  It just seems a bit of shame that I will never be able to take advantage of the free upgrade to Amazon HD.

@BarryHurley seems like we have had very similar issues.  I contacted Amazon this morning and they set me back to standard Amazon Music again.  There does not seem to be a way to do this on the Amazon website.  Hope that helps.

Hi @Stuart_17 

I completely understand your expectation for your UniFi system to work - I would expect the same. I can only recommend you get in touch with our technical support team, for some real-time troubleshooting should you wish to try HD playback again in the future.

Thank you that info Stuart 17!  I was looking on my Amazon Acct and trying to figure out how to go back to SD and didn’t see that info so figured there wasn’t a way.  I’ll give them a call this evening to see if they will switch me back to Standard!

Thank you!  Never thought to give them a call to go back to Standard.

@Corry P 

Hi Corry.  I think it is worth pointing out for (the benefit of others reading this) that I don’t think my problems stem from my Ubiquiti network not being up to the job, but more of the Sonos system not being able to cope with HD when you have large groups of Wifi only SONOS speakers.

Regards, Stuart

Hi @Stuart_17 

I think your UniFi system - and your Sonos system - are up to the job. I recommended that you get in touch with our technical support team so you can receive some advice based directly on what the speakers in your system are saying about the situation (most likely reports on electromagnetic interference levels) and make attempts to follow it, and try alternatives, in real-time.

Wiring Sonos and using SonosNet was a worthy troubleshooting step to try - when it works, it’s often the easiest fix. Even when it’s not as easy as just connecting the cable, it sufficiently changes things that other networking issues can be bypassed instead of being addressed.

There are other things we can try to address, using WiFi or SonosNet.

Looks like I’ll be calling tech support as well. My Amazon HD does the same thing. Drops out constantly. Apple Music works fine, Sirius is fine….everything but Amazon HD. Switching back to standard Amazon is not an option as I have invested heavily in a BlueSound player and high end stereo equipment in a separate stereo room to take advantage of the high definition streaming. I have Sonos throughout my entire house. It is unacceptable that all my Sonos equipment won’t work properly with Amazon HD service. 

I feel your pain @FKHoosier   It would be great to hear back from you on this thread if you get it solved. Cheers. 

The trend is going to be toward high definition streaming, not away from it. I would imagine Amazon HD is only going to grow in popularity so this is huge problem for Sonos in my opinion. They can’t ask everyone who signs on to the Amazon HD service and who have multiple devices to hardwire their system or call support to try to tweak their system to work with it. In my Amazon Music app there is a setting to stream audio at a standard rate vs the hd rate. Maybe a similar feature built in to the Sonos app would be an answer in the short run. Hopefully they can work with Amazon to correct this. I bought Sonos products because I thought they put a premium on sound quality. I understand equipment sometimes lags behind available tech but I would think HD streaming audio has been out long enough to address this. 

I’m having the same issues with Amazon Music standard with Sonos.  Tune-In and AirPlay work just fine, and the Sonos update is current.  All other wifi services and streams work, so I don’t see the need to reboot everything for what appears to be an isolated, and known, issue.

Hi all

Jumping in with a specific scenario in the hope that it may point at a particular root cause for the issue.  

I am also having repeated dropouts over multiple players, when starting an ‘HD’ stream (Amazon HD, and local ALAC files), and can reproduce this on WiFi and on SonosNet. 
 

I have since downgraded Amazon to SD, so now only get the issue on local high bitrate files. 
 

The only scenario in which I get NO dropouts, is when on SonosNet and the group coordinator is NOT wired directly to the router. 

On WiFi, I always get dropouts, no matter the group coordinator. 
 

On SonosNet, if the group coordinator is wired then I get dropouts.

Can provide other details if required but this was the only variable that caused a change in behaviour - anyone out there have any inspiration…?

Thanks

Scott

@Scotia,

it sounds like you ‘might’ have Interference on the wireless channels you are using, both SonosNet and WiFi. Perhaps see if these steps below help to resolve your issue…

• Set your Router’s 2.4 GHz WiFi to use a ‘fixed’ non-overlapping WiFi channel, either 1, 6 or 11 and if your router allows it, set it’s channel-width to 20MHz only.
• Next set your SonosNet channel in the Sonos App network settings so that it is at least 5+ channels away from your chosen router channel.
• Cable just one Sonos Product (preferably standalone) and not a HT surround, or Sub, direct to your router - keep that device at least 1 metre away from the router too. 
• Also (if practicable) cable the device that is holding your local music library to your router/LAN too.

See if that then improves things for you.

Hi Ken

Many thanks for the suggestions, much appreciated.

Apologies, I didn’t give a lot of detail in my post - this was just to try and focus on the wired group coordinator aspect. Was surprised that selecting a non-wired group coordinator had an effect, wondered if it may be indicative of something in particular. 
 

I have tried a variety of troubleshooting steps, and had a couple of calls to support, so have covered the interference issue as far as I am aware. Sadly, channels 1, 6 or 11 all have the same issue with no observable difference in the interference. Always using fixed channels that don’t overlap with my router.
The Sonos matrix is usually red and orange (sometimes yellow) down the left hand column, but always green and yellow in the middle. I thought this meant that although there is lots of interference, the players are dealing with it and the connections between them are good. Happy to be corrected!

My local library is on a WiFi connected Pi but I had the same issue with a wired Mac, so seems it may not be that. 
 

Wired player is a standalone One SL, though I also wired my playbase (again standalone) on the advice of a tech support rep on a call “more wired players are better”. These are the only 2 it is practical for me to cable (both into a dumb switch then router), sadly both on one side of the property and most of the others players are on the opposite side. No players in the middle except for a Move. 
 

If I can prevent drop outs by selecting a different group coordinator, can the problem be interference?
 

Consider two scenarios where the only change is unplugging the network cable from the playbase. (Always using the playbase as the group coordinator). When it’s wired I get dropouts, when it’s connecting via the SonosNet mesh I get none.

OneSL remains wired in both cases. Grouped are 8 players across 6 nodes.

Another test was with the same group of players and both OneSL and Playbase wired, using a different player as the group coordinator (Play:5, connecting via SonosNet mesh). No dropouts.

This has been reliably reproducible thus far, but sadly no closer to finding out why…

Ah well, will start looking at how many lossless files I actually have, can probably save myself some headaches by just reducing bandwidth!

Cheers,

Scott

So am I perhaps understanding the things you mention .. and correct in thinking .. that the times when there are audio dropouts encountered, that your wired switch is somewhere in the mix?

If so, have you tried a different cable between your router and switch and/or maybe considered trying a different switch altogether?

What switch is it?

I have seen it where some switches may create a few issues with streaming audio/video, even unmanaged switches, so it’s perhaps worth exploring that device (and cabling) as possibly playing a role in your issue.

Even with my several Wired Sonos and short distances to the wireless, 15 to 20 feet, and playing ripped CD FLAC files I sometimes see issues. Not so much with Amazon SD music.

I have an RF monitor (not just WiFi) that looks at the 2.4 channels and shows noise and utilization. Pretty cool and it lets me pick the cleanest of the three for my Sonos. BUT every neighbor, about 20 show usable signals, seems to be set to Auto Channel Selection.

What that automation seems to result in is mass migrations from channel to channel - and worse they seem to bunch up with a majority all being on one channel instead of distributed. When my Sonos channel is the one they choose I have issues, a quick channel change on my Sonos and WiFi system and all is working again.

As getting smarter neighbors seems to not be an option (they keep getting worse) I’m really looking forward to seeing Sonos on 5 GHz.