tl;dr: I’ve discovered that anytime my Playbar becomes the coordinator of any group (even a group of one), it tells Harmony to shut down.
This isn’t entirely new behavior, it’s been discussed here before:
But that thread is nearly a year old, the circumstances are different, and the apparent solution doesn’t apply to me, anyway.
My Sonos setup includes a Playbar paired with two Play:1s, another standalone Play:1, two Symfonisks, and an AMP.
The Playbar (+ surrounds) is connected via optical to a TCL Roku TV and both are being controlled by a Harmony Hub. This setup has been working flawlessly for over 2 years. Even longer when you disregard the surrounds, which I only added to the PlayBar later. Now suddenly, for the past couple of weeks, I’m experiencing the issue linked above, more or less.
If I start the TV activity while the Playbar + surrounds are grouped with my kitchen Symf for playing music, as soon as the Playbar detects audio from the TCL, the Harmony switches off the TV activity and the TCL shuts off. I start the TV activity again and everything behaves normally.
In the thread above, as well as on Reddit, people have reported that they’ve solved this by adjusting the CEC/Anytime+ settings on their TVs. But that only applies to speakers with HDMI inputs. The Playbar only has optical and there is no CEC in the mix at all. I’ve seen others report that toggling the AutoPlay/Ungroup settings in the Sonos app fixes it temporarily. That didn’t do anything for me.
As it happens, I've just recently integrated Harmony and Sonos with Home Assistant and Node-Red, so I've been able to setup the following flows and test them rapidly on demand:
- No groups active when TV activity starts:
- Join Playbar and Symf, with Symf as the coordinator: Normal
- Join Playbar and Symf, with Playbar as the coordinator: Activity powers off
- Playbar already grouped when TV activity starts:
- Un-join Playbar from Symf, where Playbar was the coordinator: Normal
- Un-join Playbar from Symf, where Symf was the coordinator: Activity powers off
Based on the above, I think it boils down to this...if my Playbar becomes a coordinator of any group while the TV activity is active, Sonos turns the activity off. So it actually had nothing to do with the audio stream at all. It’s just that that was the exact moment that the auto-play was triggering the auto-ungroup.
The first two scenarios are pretty clear. But the second two tripped me up for a minute before I realized, when a speaker leaves a group, it becomes a leader of a new “group” that is only comprised of itself.
The reason this doesn’t happen the 3rd scenario is because the Playbar is already a leader when it leaves that group.
This is really frustrating, because there’s no easy way to prevent it, other than avoiding allowing the Playbar to join a stream that’s already being led by another speaker.
I suppose I can come up with some nifty flow in HA to make sure that the Playbar is always the leader of whatever group it’s in?
Anyone willing/able to test the above and confirm I’m not the only one experiencing this? Cheers.