Skip to main content
Failing amps
Contributor I
January 1, 2025

failing hardware

  • January 1, 2025
  • 4 replies
  • 227 views

I have 8+ Sonos amps (white), for over a year I have suffered through interruption and stoppage of the music. I have been diagnosed by the highest level support (Atom). And the best response I was given was memory is failing and you need to buy new hardware. It is a significant investment, and hard to believe this is the best solution Sonos can provide. With that said my setup is such that I can’t easily switch to an alternative so I tried to use the discount code provided….and guess what the coupon didn’t work!!!

    This topic has been closed for further comments. You can use the search bar to find a similar topic, or create a new one by clicking Create Topic at the top of the page.

    4 replies

    buzz
    buzz
    January 1, 2025

    If you Group the players, systematically power down one member of the Group and then play for a while. While Mother Nature is never fair, it would be unusual for all of the units to fail at the same time — unless there was some sort of catastrophic event, such as a nearby lightning strike or other power “event”.

    Also, systematically pick a different player as you start to build the Group.

      Stanley_4
      Stanley_4
      Grand Maestro
      January 1, 2025

      Failing memory in Amps had me quite worried, seeing they are Connect Amps, less worried.

      An earlier topic here discussed moving Connects and Connect Amps to the S1 controller / firmware as it was easier on the internal memory.

      Folks don’t appreciate the huge advances made in memory over the last few years, not just size but durability. Hopefully all Sonos Amps have enough spare memory to deal with failures and enough durability that the failures will be longer in coming.

        Antifon
        Prodigy III
        January 1, 2025

        As already said, you would have to be unlucky for all of them to develop a hardware fault at the same time but… having said that, the older ZonePlayer/Connect generation of units had power supplies that were not especially reliable - I probably rebuilt half a dozen of them when I owned ZonePlayers.

        Failing memory sounds possible, but you wouldn’t expect to see anything other than a small number of failures. Typically they conform to the well-known electronic component failure pattern, where you get most failures early in life and then they will go on for many years without issues. Generally the worst component by a long, long way is the electrolytic capacitor - which explains why the majority of failures are in the power supplies.

        As suggested, you may find that taking just one or two out of the system solves the problem - though of course it’s time consuming to diagnose a problem in that way… Another option would be to try reducing the reliance of the system on wifi, by hardwiring more of them directly via Ethernet.

         

          Stanley_4
          Stanley_4
          Grand Maestro
          January 2, 2025

          The Sonos memory issues are not in RAM, which does follow the curve you mentioned but in the re-programmable memory used for the operating system and persistent data. While it follows the same failure curve initially it also has a different failure mode when cells can no longer accept another cycle of new data and have to be discarded from the available pool.

          Excellent discussions of the details in the old topics.

            Terms & ConditionsAccessibility statement