Question

Insufficient Connection Speed for FLAC?

H

I have a NAS and a Sonos system with 15 or so components all running on SonosNet (WM:0) on Channel 1. The NAS is hardwired to my Router, as are many of the Sonos units. 

The Router doesn’t provide any WiFi itself but is hard-wired to a separate dual-band mesh WiFi system running on Channel 11 on 2.4Ghz

Playing MP3s from the NAS and internet sources works fine but when playing FLAC files from the NAS we often get "network connection speed insufficient to maintain playback buffer" dropouts and track skipping - even on the most frequently used Sonos units that are all hard-wired to the Router and are all showing Green on the left hand column of the Network Matrix. 

I assume I should be able to play FLAC files and not just MP3 and internet sources, so any idea what is most likely causing this problem?

Network Matrix

 

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12 replies

ratty

Presumably this is when a number of rooms are grouped. Even wired nodes can drop if the group coordinator (the first room) is wireless on a marginal connection. Start the group from one of the wired nodes and add the others to it. 

H

Nope … this is when playing FLAC in just one wired room. No other music being played anywhere else :-/

C
Userlevel 5
Badge +9

Curious, why are all Sonos devices tertiary nodes? My hardwired are secondary, and the wireless are tertiary.

ratty

One wired room, playing local files from the NAS? I can’t imagine the NAS isn’t able to keep up, so perhaps the network connection is flaky. I would run some ping tests and look for a dodgy connection somewhere.

ratty

Curious, why are all Sonos devices tertiary nodes? My hardwired are secondary, and the wireless are tertiary.

Presumably the root bridge is a couple of STP hops away. 

H

One wired room, playing local files from the NAS? I can’t imagine the NAS isn’t able to keep up, so perhaps the network connection is flaky. I would run some ping tests and look for a dodgy connection somewhere.

How do I do that?

Curious, why are all Sonos devices tertiary nodes? My hardwired are secondary, and the wireless are tertiary.

I have no idea. I don’t know what secondary and tertiary nodes are!

Curious, why are all Sonos devices tertiary nodes? My hardwired are secondary, and the wireless are tertiary.

Presumably the root bridge is a couple of STP hops away. 

You’ve lost me there!

The NAS is wired directly to the Router with a short single cable. So is the ZonePlayer.

ratty

One wired room, playing local files from the NAS? I can’t imagine the NAS isn’t able to keep up, so perhaps the network connection is flaky. I would run some ping tests and look for a dodgy connection somewhere.

How do I do that?

A variety of ways, for example:

  • The Fing app for iOS or Android
  • PingInfoView from NirSoft on Windows
  • Also using http://x.x.x.x:1400/tools to get a Sonos node to ping a target directly

You’d be looking for ping times above a few milliseconds on a wired connection. The first ping typically takes a little longer, for address resolution. 

Wireless connections are much more variable, but anything consistently in high double figures of milliseconds suggests problems. 

 

You can also run some bandwidth tests if you hooked a laptop up to selected wire connections. 

 

The NAS is wired directly to the Router with a short single cable. So is the ZonePlayer.

If the player has two Ethernet ports then connect the NAS to the second port, daisy-chained. Assuming that plays FLAC fine, work out from there changing one thing at a time to identify bottlenecks.

H

One wired room, playing local files from the NAS? I can’t imagine the NAS isn’t able to keep up, so perhaps the network connection is flaky. I would run some ping tests and look for a dodgy connection somewhere.

How do I do that?

A variety of ways, for example:

  • The Fing app for iOS or Android
  • PingInfoView from NirSoft on Windows
  • Also using http://x.x.x.x:1400/tools to get a Sonos node to ping a target directly

You’d be looking for ping times above a few milliseconds on a wired connection. The first ping typically takes a little longer, for address resolution. 

Wireless connections are much more variable, but anything consistently in high double figures of milliseconds suggests problems. 

Thanks. I’ll give that a go.

H

One wired room, playing local files from the NAS? I can’t imagine the NAS isn’t able to keep up, so perhaps the network connection is flaky. I would run some ping tests and look for a dodgy connection somewhere.

How do I do that?

A variety of ways, for example:

  • The Fing app for iOS or Android
  • PingInfoView from NirSoft on Windows
  • Also using http://x.x.x.x:1400/tools to get a Sonos node to ping a target directly

You’d be looking for ping times above a few milliseconds on a wired connection. The first ping typically takes a little longer, for address resolution. 

Wireless connections are much more variable, but anything consistently in high double figures of milliseconds suggests problems. 

 

You can also run some bandwidth tests if you hooked a laptop up to selected wire connections.

 

If the player has two Ethernet ports then connect the NAS to the second port, daisy-chained. Assuming that plays FLAC fine, work out from there changing one thing at a time to identify bottlenecks.

Do you mean connect the NAS directly to the player, not via the Router?

ratty

Do you mean connect the NAS directly to the player, not via the Router?

Yes, as an experiment. It will simplify the path as much as possible. 

N
Userlevel 5
Badge +9

As I have said in a previous post playing flacs across many speakers became so unreliable I created a seperate library of 320 mp3 files. I suspect the adding of additional features to the software over the years and Sonos concentrating on low bitrate streaming services has brought this about. I have a clear channel for my SonosNet so I am puzzled as to why flac playing has got so poor. I have no directly wired players. The only directly wired unit is the Boost.

busy trying to edit the queue
S

@ninjabob My case seems almost same but I had problem with Wifi.
Was getting same error for FLAC files.
Today I switched to 5Hz from 2.4Hz wifi network, it worked. Will have to play more songs and see if this is a permanent solution for who uses wifi. 

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