Room with sonos AMP and Sub4 but the AMP is physically in a different room. Sub 4 connectivity issue

The sub connects to another speaker by its own dedicated 5ghz WiFi. It doesn’t act as a standalone speaker on your ‘normal’ wifi. So if it’s too far from its bonded speaker partner, it will struggle.

Don’t turn WiFi off on the amp though or the 5ghz WiFi connection to the Sub won’t work.

If all else fails, can you connect the Sub to the Amp by Ethernet?

(If I’ve misunderstood anything, apologies.)

Hi, 

Oh no I was afraid of this. Is there anyway to connect the sub 4 to the actual wifi?

The sub 4 is too far away from the amp physically. There are no data points in the room to wire the sub 4 up. There is however strong WiFi in the room from the wifi access point in the ceiling so if I could get the sub 4 to connect to the home wifi it could see the amp that is already hard wired into the home network.

Is this not possible?  

I spoke to support and I could cry :( 

They confirmed the sub 4 simply can’t connect to the wifi directly.

They said a proprietary Sonosnet “wireless device to device” system is used and the Amp need to be physically in the same room as the Sub 4.

Obviously this is no good to me since the Amp is 50 meters away the comms room so this Sonosnet wireless device to device link is useless.

Why on earth the Sub 4 can’t just connect to the wifi to see the Amp on the same LAN I do not know. 

​@soundspeaker 

Sounds like a bad situation. As far as I know in the past bonded speakers (sub and / or surround speakers) tried to use 2,4 ghz standard wifi as fallback, if the internal 5 ghz home theater wifi wasn’t available. But I don‘t know if that still is actual information. And on the other hand this fallback often didn’t work well. As you said you tried to turn off Sonos Amps wifi… so the sub imo would have tried to use that fallback connection. But obviously it also didn’t work. 
If there is no Ethernet port available next to the sub, the only (officialy not supported by Sonos) option I see, is using a wireless wifi extender that is multicast compatible, can be configured as a wireless bridge and supports an ethernet port for the Sonos Sub. 
AVM Fritz system for example supports such a setup. 
If you then turn of Amps wifi and Amp and Sub both are connected via lan cable imho this could work, as if the sub would be connected directly via lan cable to the router or an access point. These AVM products can be configured like an access point that is connected to the router via wifi. 
But again… that just would be an experiment and no official supported usecase. The partial wifi route of the data transfer between Sub and Amp would be the critical part. 
But maybe it’s worth a try. 

Thanks!

I got a long 20m network cable and ran it to the Sub 4 connected to a LAN switch and….. it works!

So I just need to get a data point wired into that room now from the comms room.

Thanks again for the advice. No more tears.

But still, why Sonos don’t allow it to work over regular wifi is a bit of a mystery. Latency wouldn’t be an issue with modern 5Ghz wifi6 / wifi7. I think Sonos developers should reconsider this since it already works on the LAN with the ethernet cable so the code is there for it to work.

​@soundspeaker 

I think the Sonos developers with an experience background of many years will have good reasons to use the dedicated home theater internal 5 ghz wifi or the ethernet lan cable connection. The standard router wifi imho can be influenced by too many factors and connection quality could be some kind of lottery. 
 

Best option in your case still is the direct lan cable connection to the router, access point or compatible (igmp snooping support) ethernet switch. 
If possible, I would try to hide the lan cable and get a permanent switch to sub cable connection. 

Agree. I’m going to assume the use case if you have a rack with amp(s) in other location(s), you are highly likely to have structured cabling to other rooms, even if they are not being used from day one, so the preferred option would be to cable the HT system.

Personally I think this was a massive oversight when Sonos released the Amp, but I get it that it makes more sense to use 5GHz when using the Amp for TV purposes. Some people however don’t use it for TV but to power built in speakers for example and in this case it would make sense to allow a 2.4GHz connection for the Sub like the old Connect:Amp could do perfectly fine.

​@Outburst 

If Sonos allowed the Sub to join the house WiFi, it would cause more issues than it solves, as many people use the Sub for home theatre. There would be people on here moaning that the Sub isn’t working in sync with the TV - but they’d be manually grouping it instead of bonding it…

And most people not using their Sub for home theatre will usually place it near the speaker they are wanting to enhance, not having the sub and speaker 50m apart…

I get this point, but Sonos supports grouping rooms through the standard router wifi, and that includes HD atmos audio, which should be much more bandwidth then sending bass to a sub. In a situation where you’re playing TV audio and you can’t buffer the audio, yes, but I don’t think there is a technical limitation when you are streaming music.

I would argue that Sonos hasn’t enabled subs to operate through the wifi router rather than directly connected to the Sonos speaker/amp it’s bonded to mostly because it’s not a high priority development.  The volume of people who want to bond a sub to an amp with the amp a far distance away, with no TV audio involved,  is pretty low.  It may be a factor of just not breaking what isn’t broken just to appeal to a small set of protentional customers.  Indeed, there are probably more people who would use the feature to ‘cheat’ and try and move a single sub around to multiple rooms, rather than buy multiple subs or unbond/bond the speaker each time you move your sub.

The only comment I’d add is to consider the impact of “pollution” on the 5Ghz band.

This bonded 5Hhz device to device wireless link (sonosnet?) is taking channels from an already tight 5Ghz band. Like the way HP printers enable “Wireless direct printing” by default and drown out a full 80Mhz width of channels on the 5Ghz band.

Also with the bonded, it looks like the Sub 4 is a child of the Amp so the DHCP request passes through the Amp. Some DHCP servers don’t like this as it looks dodgy so I would say some people have reported issues like this.

It would be great to have an advanced option to completely disable all bonding device to device wifi broadcasting and just use the existing wifi network.

Anyway, I don’t care now that I know it works wired. 

Thanks again everyone

Well I specifically talked about non-TV playback, I do agree for that it’s problematic, but it’s not uncommon to have Amps in a tech room somewere with only speaker wires running to the separate rooms. When you want to use a Sub there and don’t have Ethernet you have a problem. And as said, this kind of setup worked fine with the Connect:Amp.

And also just to add…

The old connect amp is not a home theater device. So 2,4 ghz connection to Sub is fine. 
That also would probably work well for the Sonos Amp in music mode. The „problem“ imo is, that Sonos for the Amp would have to switch between 2,4 ghz standard wifi connection and 5 ghz internal home theater wifi each time depending on using music or tv mode. 
Edit: 

If there is no tv mode used (no hdmi connection) and also no rearspeakers bonded, the Sonos Amp could work the same like a connect amp. 
But I doubt Sonos will enable 2,4 ghz sub connection just for this rare usecase. 

The problem is that having the option to directly bond a sub to amp via 5 GHz, or bond a sub to amp via local wifi while losing TV audio capabilities...is probably too complex a decision for the typical Sonos consumer to have to make. While I agree that may people will  still use long runs of speaker cable and central location for amps, it’s not necessary with Sonos, and probably rather rare that a user wants these long runs and a wireless sub.

As far as this sort of setup working for the Connect:Amp, I’m not sure that wasn’t always the case. I could be misremembering, but Subs have always been required to directly bond with the speakers.  That may have been 2.4Ghz at one point, allowing for a greater distance between the sub and Connect: Amp, but it was always a direct connection, rather than connecting through the home router.

Unfortunately I have the same situation: Sonos Amps in central rack connected to speakers in remote rooms.  The amps were too far away from the subs in the room so would not connect via sonosnet and wouldn’t work on WiFi, so I went through the effort to connect the subs via Ethernet.

Unfortunately, now I have a new issue: the sub sound is delayed and the music sounds terrible and garbled.  I can hear the bass behind the music from the speakers. As I understand it this is because the amp plays the music directly, it is virtually instantly transmitted via the speaker wires to the speakers, but the bass signal has to to through my router first and then through the Ethernet to the Sonos Subs.   All of that takes just long enough to create a garbled mess.

This is massively disappointing and makes Sonos Amps and Sonos Subs really ineffective for any sort of whole home central distribution system.  I suspect this could be fixed with some sort of software delay from the amps to the speakers.  Has anyone found a fix for this or should customers simply avoid Sonos for a central distribution system.  I, unfortunately, have multiple rooms I already paid for.

Have you submitted a system diagnostic within 10 minutes of experiencing this problem, and called Sonos Support to discuss it? Don’t post the resulting diagnostic number here, they get sensitive about GDPR.

There may be information included in the diagnostic that will help Sonos pinpoint the issue and help you find a solution.

When you speak directly to the Support staff, they have tools at their disposal that will allow them to give you advice specific to your network and Sonos system.

My suspicion is the Sub delay you’re experiencing is due to network issues, but I have no real explanation for the garbledness (if that’s a word). Which is one reason I’m suggesting a diagnostic, and a call. There really could be data that we in the public (you, included) can’t see, and might possibly explain the issue’s you’re experiencing.