Connect Amp keeps dropping out audio

Have you submitted a diagnostic and called Sonos? There are two things that come to mind when reading your post, ducking associated with a voice assistant and/or overheating of the Amps for some reason. A diagnostic would go a long way to finishing out, but unfortunately, those of us in the community have no access to that data, only Sonos employees do. 

Just quick update on the problem - The new Amp is still working fine and no drop outs so far whereas the Connect Amp in the other room is still dropping out intermittently! I do find that if the Connect Amp is dropping out regularly if I power it down and then power it up again it seems to fix the problem for a few hours which still isn't satisfactory as I dont want to be doing this regularly! It does look increasingly like this is a lack of memory problem caused by Sonos software upgrades eating up more and more memory!!!! As for submitting diagnostics I am not sure it's worthwhile as I submitted numerous diagnostics to Sonos Support (call handlers!!) who insisted it was WiFi interference until finally admitting it was lack of memory! I think anyone with legacy Sonos products has been screwed by Sonos forcing them to spend on new equipment when it isn't necessary for people like me. I dont want any fancy software gimmicks I just want to listen to the radio!!!! Why they cant come clean and issue a software update for the older systems with limited capabilities I dont know but I guess its good for sales!

We continue to have intermittent drop-outs on all 4 of our Connect:Amp devices, so here’s my update after 1.5 hours on the phone with Sonos today. They said the diagnostics for one of the Connect:Amp devices the chose to investigate showed multiple major alerts, including:

• Cannot allocate memory to full status
• Write failed
• Player crashed: out of memory
• OOM Killer

These items all sound like they are related to memory issues with the older Connect:Amp product, as Big Bull mentioned in his previous post.

All 4 of our Connect:Amp devices are wired directly to the network switch and they all have their WiFi radios disabled. I would have thought this would prevent a SonosNet network from being created. We do have some wireless speakers (three Play:1 speakers and two One:SL speakers in a stereo link), however, without WiFi turned on for any of the devices that are wired directly to the network I didn’t think a SonosNet network could be formed.

However, the tech on the phone told me to change my SonosNet channel from Channel 1 to Channel 6, and after waiting a few minutes for this to take effect he did a diagnostic on the same Connect:Amp device that had all the memory errors previously and said that it was coming up clean without errors.

This doesn’t make any sense to me. I’m not sure if it is related yet or not, and it is difficult to tell if this has “solved” anything until we run the system for a while and see if anyone reports intermittent drop-out issues.

The tech also mentioned a “stream underflow” error that is caused when we use the same account from the same services (ie. Apple Music) to play two different songs in two different rooms. I don’t know why this should be an issue since it is a “family” account that has permission to play on up to 5 devices simultaneously and our Internet is plenty fast enough to handle it. Has any one ever come across an issues like this?

Finally, after 1.5 hours the tech asked if I would like to be escalated to a Level 2 tech to answer some of my more “technical” questions, so I said yes. However, there were no Level 2 techs available so they will email me to setup an appointment. Fingers crossed.

I’d really be curious what is meant by ‘OOM killer’. 

Hi just to update on my Connect Amp problem, it's over 2 weeks now and since replacing the CA with the newer Amp I have not had any problems! I still have problems with dropouts with the other CA and find that if I power it down and up again it seems to fix the problem albeit for a day and I suspect that powering down and up is clearing the memory buffers and so more and more suspect that the problem is lack of memory caused by multiple updates over the years taken up more and more memory! Will be interested to see if Bill’s problem has been fixed!

See: https://www.kernel.org/doc/gorman/html/understand/understand016.html

That falls under “should never happen” on an embedded system like Sonos. Someone may have created a memory leak or allocation error when tweaking update coding.

Many tears have been shed by embedded developers over this kind of glitch that can be difficult to find. I’d put them right after “loads and instantly crashes” in programmer pain.

More evidence that ‘jargon’ shouldn’t be used, a contractions that are unlikely to be known by the general public should be spelled out, the first use. 

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.

Same problem, 4 AMP of which two lose sound...

SONOS did a wrong analysis and accidentally said that there were memory failures in some of the units. But since they only give a 2-year warranty, mine was 2.5 years too old.
How can SONOS sell products that obviously have manufacturing problems and then say that they can replace them with a 30% discount on new ones? Wonder if Tesla would sell cars that stop working after 2 years and say, sorry you have to buy a new car every two years because the warranty has expired.
So bad from SONOS so I will be discontinuing my SONOS system and switching to BOSE...

Hi there.  So I have similar issues as above with 2 connect amps.  (Have posted here eventually the other day,  but haven’t really got anywhere further as I’ve tried all the usual restarts, moving other devices, rewiring, setting fixed IPs, WiFi vs Sonosnet etc.)  These units were fine for years until about summer 23 so very very interested to read about new ‘incompatible’ system software above - as this had occurred to me.  Do others here still have the same problems potentially with memory?

Is it right that hardware can be made unusable because of a software update?  I wonder if this problem is widespread.