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Connect Amp keeps dropping out audio

  • 19 September 2023
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B
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Hi I have 4 Connect Amps that have been working fine for some years but just recently they are dropping the Audio for a few seconds which is very annoying. I have spoken to Sonos Support on a few occasions and done everything they have suggested to fix this which they say is WiFi Interference such as switching channels etc but still have problems. This happens on any music source but I have noticed when the speakers go silent the sound levels are still going up and down on the app as if its playing the audio in other words not muted, not sure if this helps identify the problem. I am getting to the point now where soon these will be removed as they just aren't worth the hassle. I have seen a few threads where people have had the same problem but the only answers I have seen are contact Sonos Support.

Has anyone had this problem and got a viable solution??????

Some posts suggest an issue with S2 being introduced so does anyone know if this is a problem??

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Best answer by Ken_Griffiths 20 September 2023, 12:17

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95 replies

Airgetlam

I don’t follow your logic. If they maintained S1 for older devices, and only chose to disable devices that were used for upgrades, how does that indicate ‘phasing out’? I can see the ‘phasing out’ for trade ins, but wouldn’t it have been much easier for them to stop support completely, and drop S1? Force everyone to upgrade, rather than giving people an option? 

I will ask again for a discussion where Sonos talked about this. It’s certainly possible I’m wrong, so I would love to see a link. 

And if you’re concerned about the need for ‘upgrades’, I’d recommend staying away from technology completely. Everything that has electronic memory, and a CPU will eventually need to be updated/upgraded . It’s happened to phones, computers, handhelds, etc. 

Bruce
B
Badge +3

Still no joy on fixing my drop out problem, I even emailed the CEO Patrick Spence in desperation but he didn’t respond so he’s as good as his ‘expert’ support engineers who are really just call handlers! At the very beginning of this experience I told the support guy that I had hard wired my system to the router before we started diagnosing the problem and coming to the initial conclusion that the problem was wifi interference! Here is a dum question…….if my system is hard wired to the router and the wifi on each Connect Amp disabled how can the problem be wifi interference? It’s got to the situation that I’m looking at the Amazon Echo Link Amp to replace all my Connect Amps especially as they are a lot cheaper! 

buzz

I think that it could prevent a lot of ill will if there was a memory check utility that would end speculation. This could be standalone or part of an S2 upgrade. SONOS support could quickly run the utility and save a lot of time on the phone.

Airgetlam

I think you’ve seen all you’re going to from Sonos. They’ve seen the issue, and are working on it. The forum moderators aren’t allowed to give any more information, and likely don’t know any more information. They seem to find out what is in a new software release at the same time we do. If you couldperhaps get into a beta, and that particular beta was working on that issue, you might have advance knowledge…but then would be beholden to the NDA not to discuss what you know. And that’s even if there was a beta that involved that particular bug. 

There isn’t much we can do, beyond sending them diagnostics, and calling in to make sure they are passed on to the engineers to look at. We have to wait, beyond that, to even see if it is fixable. Since we don’t know the true nature of the issue, we can only make assumptions. Sonos’ policies won’t allow them to tell us. 

From personal experience with bugs in video games, they’re both hard to figure out, and resolve. Being able to include our customers in that process was impossible, and we would patch our game just as soon as we could, without notification time. Our forum moderators were never aware, from moment to moment, where the issue’s status was, and consequently were instructed not to discuss it…especially timing of any potential fixes. We often ‘fixed’ bugs on one engineers machine, but it wouldn’t stand the test across the QA machines, so any timing discussion would have been premature.

It is frustrating, certainly, but there isn’t much we can do, as customers, beyond provide Sonos hard data so that they can reproduce the issue, and hope for a quick fix. 

Bruce
buzz

On occasion a defective CONNECT:AMP can cause network issues. Experiment with powering down one at a time.

In terms of network stability, reserve IP addresses for all regular network clients.

J

The Bose products i have dont need software support for 10 years, they just keep working, which dosent seem to be the case for sonos. If you have a product that continuously need to be tweeked and updated to work then thats not a product for me. I want a finished product.

I truly regret spending money on sonos thinking that this would last a bit longer than the warranty, when there were other brands with the same functions.

O

Add me to the list with super frustrating issues with 6 connects and 1 connect amps.  I guess misery loves company!  No way would I invest the money to upgrade.  I have no newer items.  is there any risk in the S2 to S1 downgrade?  Can someone link me to a procedure to do that?

B

Bad news, we are still having continual drop outs and faults on all 4 of our Connect:Amp products. I spoke with a Level 2 tech at Sonos for an hour today, and the bottom line is that they don’t have an answer, other than these products are reaching the “limits of their capabilities”. 

This sure sounds like tech-speak for “Connect:Amp products don’t have enough memory to support the memory requirements of the S2 software update we rolled out in June 2023”. They really didn’t have any solution, other than to suggest disconnecting all 4 Connect:Amp devices from the network and plug in a different device instead. I will try this, just to say that I did, but I obviously don’t expect it to make any difference. They also suggested ensuring that the “crossfade” and “shuffle” features aren’t used, as this will reduce the load on the devices, but we rarely use those features anyways.

They wouldn’t give me any information on how much memory is being used or how much memory is free on these devices. I asked about downgrading to S1 and they said that is possible but they couldn’t guarantee any improvements. Also, this would involve completely settting up our system from scratch again, since the configuration from the S2 system would not be transferred over to the S1 system. With over 40 users of our current system with 25 different music services, this is not a reasonable option.

I told him as much and he mentioned that some products are eligible for a 15% - 30% discount if buying new replacement products through their upgrade program. I told him I would need a much bigger discount than that (ie. 50%). He put me on hold for 20 minutes and came back to tell me that I was only eligible for a 15% discount. Absolutely infuriating.

I might downgrade one of the Connect:Amps to S1 for a few days to try it and see how it performs. If it works okay, then perhaps I’ll just bit the bullet and roll everything back to S1 and re-setup the system from scratch. Ugh.

buzz

Always reserve IP addresses. 

Ken_Griffiths

Besides switching your router WiFi channels, what else have you done to reduce wireless interference, thus far? Have you tried setting WiFi channel-widths to 20Mhz, or giving SonosNet a shot, or even wiring more than one Sonos device back to the router (perhaps with some of the four C:A’s having their WiFi adapters disabled etc?)

It would be quite helpful to know more about your setup, what you have tried yourself and what troubleshooting you’ve done already with Sonos Support.

buzz

From my seat this seems like some sort of communication issue, but this leaves tracks in the diagnostics.

Are you Grouping the players? Try reducing the size of the Group and building the Group in a different order.

Use a network analysis App, and check PING times to the players. Many of these Apps can check for duplicate Ip addresses.

Stanley_4
Userlevel 7
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If you are seeing volume levels being changed make sure you haven’t enabled anything that would be changing them.

If you suspect it is an external problem change your WiFi password.

If you wait for the problem and send in a diagnostic the Sonos folks can likely give you a better idea about what is going wrong.

You might try wiring one or more of your Amps to Ethernet to see if that helps. Try channels 1, 6 amd 11 to see if any one is better than the others. Pick the best and mover your WiFi to one of the other two.

AjTrek1
Userlevel 7

If you are using a Sonos Bridge in your setup you should remove it as it is outdated and could be the root cause of your issues.

Here’s the way I suggest to remove the Bridge and still keep the SonosNet.

Wire one of the Connect:Amps back to your router via Ethernet. Wait 5 -10 minutes and remove the Bridge.

As the Connect:Amps are a bit long-in-the-tooth as well there’s no guarantee the above will resolve your issue; but it’s worth a try.

Together Everyone Achieves More = T.E.A.M.
106rallye
Userlevel 7
Badge +17

Since you’re on S1 you must have had a different problem (showing the same symptoms), since the problem spoken about here seems to be a memory overflow on older devices using S2.

Ken_Griffiths

So far I have tried as suggested by Sonos to give the 5GHz Wifi a different name, turned off auto on 2.4GHz channels so I can force it to be 1, 6 or 11, I haven't tried setting to 20Mhz so will give this a try.

Btw Ken can you give me more advice re your comment “give Sonnet a shot”? I did originally have one C:A hard wired to my switch with ethernet cable and then daisy chained the other 3 C:A’s but this didnt help, do you think it would be better for each C:A to be hard wired to the switch?

SonosNet is where one device is wired to the router (but positioned at least one metre away) - that allows Sonos to use its own in-built wireless mesh signal… so all your other Amps connect back to the wired device either directly or indirectly. If doing that, it’s best to do two further things…

  1. Set the SonosNet channel in the App’s network settings so it is at least 5 channels away from your chosen 2.4Ghz router channel, which should in turn be on fixed channel 1, 6 or 11 and ideally set at 20Mhz channel-width (if the router allows).
  2. Remove the router WiFi SSID from the Sonos App network settings as the local WiFi signal is no longer used and that will stop the Amps trying to hop onto your WiFi signal.

All that said however, the fact you now have the option to wire all to a switch - it makes sense to go with that option instead and you could even choose to switch off the Amps WiFi adapters in the Sonos App to reduce the potential for network loops/storms, but if they do work fine with the WiFi adapters enabled, then I would just leave them - that’s a matter for yourself.

Here are some links that may assist too…

 

B

I have a similar setup and nearly identical isseus to the OP (Big Bull). We have a large multi-room yoga and Pilates studio with 4 Connect:Amp devices, 3 Play:1 devices and 2 One SL devices linked as a stereo pair.

All of the Connect:Amp devices have had frequent (but intermittent) drop outs over the past several months, exactly as the OP described. They are all hard-wired to the network switch, but I still had Wi-Fi enabled on each of them as well (I didn’t know there was an option to disable it until reading this thread). I just disabled WiFi a few minutes ago, so I will see if that improves our situation at all (I suspect it will not based on this thread).

I fully believe that it is likely a memory limitation issue with the S2 software running on these older Connect:Amp devices. However, I don’t know how to find the amount of Free memory for each device, can anyone help me with that?

FWIW, these issues seem to have occured after the June 2023 software update to S2 version 15.5. Interestingly, there is an alert posted in the release notes of the 15.6 update released July 25, 2023 about adjusting how older Sonos products use their internal memory. See below (copied from https://support.sonos.com/en-ca/article/release-notes-for-sonos-s2):

Alerts:

  • With this update, we’ve adjusted how some of our older Sonos products are using their internal memory. Because of this change, updates for Play:1, Play:3, Boost, Connect, Connect:Amp, and Sub (Gen 1 and 2) will take longer to complete than before. The reset process for these products will also take more time to complete after this update.

I am holding out some hope that disabling WiFi may improve the free memory issues a little bit, but if that is not the case then I may consider downgrading our entire system to S1. According to https://support.sonos.com/en-ca/article/sonos-s2-compatibility, One SL devices can only be added to S2 systems, but One SLs that are already part of an S1 system will continue to work as they do today. I guess this means I may have to run 2 separate systems, an S1 system for all of our older devices and an S2 system for the One SLs. This isn’t really a problem since we never link rooms together anyways, but it’s annoying for our 40+ instructors who will all need to have both the S1 and the S2 apps installed on their phones.

Any other advice to try and diagnose our issues before making a major change like this downgrade? Your help is much appreciated!

Airgetlam

I think it is less of a ‘borked firmware’ issue, and more of a ‘MTBF’ issue with electronic memory.

Bruce
B
Badge +3

Hi Bill I got fed up chasing my tail with suggestions from Sonos support that I have replaced one of my 4 Connect Amps with the newer Amp which has more memory and so far I haven’t had any drop outs! Still early days so will keep on testing the unit to see if it’s definitely the solution, the remaining Connect Amps are still dropping out intermittently! If this is the solution then it’s a costly one as it means replacing the other 3 😡

J

We are having the same issue. We have 2 connect amps on our S2 system that have been fine for years. Then all of a sudden within the last month and a half both of these amps are dropping the audio and raising and lowering the volume all on their own. Both of these devices are hardwired to our router, and have the wifi turned off. We have a beam, with two play 1s as surrounds, and a Move that are having no problem playing music. 

It seems very suspicious that both of these amps started to exhibit this same behavior at the same time. We have rebooted all of the Sonos devices, as well as the router to see if this was the issue with no success. 

Anyone else seeing this?

A

Well, I updated to 16.0 last night and still the same issues, not sure if that was supposed to be the fix as there was nothing in the release note.   Guess we’ll just have to wait. 

A
Userlevel 3
Badge +1

I’ve posted this elsewhere but it’s more relevant to this topic.

 

i now have 3 Connect:Amps and my Connect all suffering from stuttering and drop-outs.

 

this is not a network issue as all my modern Sonos Amps work just fine.  This is too much of a coincidence to believe these are all suffering failing memory around the same time.  Plus, a reboot solves the issue, albeit temporarily suggesting a memory leak or other firmware bug. 

This all started with a firmware (v15.x?)  push last year and Sonos have been too evasive on causes, other than hinting at faulty hardware, and trying to avoid blame.  Sorry Sonos — this isn’t good enough — this is a problem of your making, and a solution is needed.  Can we have some answers, please ?

Sndrew S 
 

G
Userlevel 2
Badge

believe new update just dropped that appears to address this.  YMMV.

S

Its no coincidence SONOS wanted to phase out and actually disable these older products. As I recall they only backtracked when users became outraged and they started getting a ton of bad press. Well then it seems scheduled obsolescence is what they decided to do instead. As a Wireless Network Engineer what really upsets me is the attempt to blame it on network issues when they know exactly what the issue is. Well if they won't upgrade we will make them upgrade. I would never recommend another SONOS product to anyone. I just can't trust they will stand behind their products. 

There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you Fool me — you can't get fooled again.
Airgetlam

I don’t recall any time at which Sonos planned, discussed, or announced that they wanted to phase out older equipment. They always had S1 support for them. Can you point me to a discussion where this is not the case?

The only thing I’m aware of that they backtracked on was forcing the old device out of service when it was used to get a discount on a newer device. That lasted for about three weeks, then they decided to allow the user to keep the old device ‘traded in’ as functional. 

Bruce
Ken_Griffiths

That’ correct but Sonos do issue further builds under the main update the most recent was last Wednesday I believe when mine went from version 76.2-47270 up to v.76.2-49050, this is what I was asking on my original comment, if anyone knew if the release notes are published for these ‘sub’ updates?

No I’ve not seen anything, so sorry can’t help.

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