Sonos shutting down Harmony activity when PlayBar becomes group coordinator

  • 30 December 2020
  • 2 replies
  • 147 views
I

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.

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2 replies

Rowena B.
Userlevel 5
Badge +16

Hi @IcyKettle, 

Thank you for reaching us in the Sonos community and for providing details in your post. Your frustration is completely understandable.

Can you please try replicating the steps below and submitting a diagnostic report for each?

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.

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.

 

This will help us investigate what's happening in your Sonos system after grouping and ungrouping your device. Please be sure to reply here with the confirmation number to take a closer look. We'll wait for your reply.

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I

Hi @Rowena B. ,

Thanks for the follow up. I don’t know if there’s much more I can provide beyond the above. But I did start a support chat the other day, where I shared a couple diagnostic report keys: (2116692419 and 146937173).

The CS person who I chatted with didn’t really seem to understand what I was experiencing, which was frustrating enough. But then after several minutes of back and forth, she said:

...you cannot create a group while playing TV audio, we don't support that, that is the reason why you have this issue. 

Which is just plain wrong. Of course you can group speakers while playing TV audio. It’s one of the best features of Sonos and the primary reason I’ve invested so much in it, because it allows me to listen to whatever is playing on my Playbar on any of my other speakers and even my backyard AMP. I was kind of shocked to see a support tech make that statement. And it’s a red herring, anyway, since it wasn’t grouping speakers that was causing my issue. It was the Playbar being auto-removed from a group when TV audio began flowing.

At any rate, I stumbled on a reddit thread where another user found a workaround by removing Sonos from Harmony altogether, adding a (fake) random AV receiver in its place, and then having the Playbar learn those remote commands. I tried that and it works fine. The downside is that I can’t control the Playbar via IP anymore...I had to move my hub within view of the Playbar to allow for IR control. A small price to pay to get rid of this issue.

So, I’m just going to roll with this b/c I don’t have time to continue troubleshooting it and the workaround is good enough. But I hope your team looks into this. I’m wondering now if it's not a Sonos “feature” at all, but rather a Harmony one. Maybe since Harmony controls Sonos via the API, it’s seeing these grouping/ungrouping events and deciding to shut down activities, thinking that it’s being helpful. If so, Sonos should tell them to stop doing that. It’s not helpful at all and makes using the two systems together really difficult.

Thanks and happy new year! Cheers.

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