Group wifi settings - problems with streaming hi-res music

Someone should pick it up anyway but I’ll flag the post for official attention.

By the way, the reason the audio gets interrupted as a track is ending is that the next track is trying to download into the player buffer. The bandwidth required for a CD quality track is clearly much greater than for Apple/Spotify. For some reason this traffic burst is causing grief somewhere. Hopefully a look at the system internals may shed some light.

You’d be better off getting in touch with German Support by phone, since the staff there have experience with Vodafone and the routers provided by them. In case you’re a native speaker, there is English speaking staff too.

https://support.sonos.com/s/contact?language=de

Thanks again for your assistance on this (both of you). Overall really pleased with Sonos and the Quobuz stream is very impressive (in case anyone hasnt tried it yet). Missing a couple of my favourite groups, but listening to music through it is impressive. I will keep everyone update on this and hope that this thread may be of use to others. Kudos to @ratty and @Smilja  for investing their time on helping me. Thumbs up to Community life. Enjoy the rest of the weekend.

Hi @DerkleineEnglaender 

Welcome to the Sonos Community!

Sorry for the delay. I’ve looked at the diagnostics and the Playbase is reporting issues with getting the stream from the source fast enough. As the Playbase is ethernet-wired, I would put this down to the extender it’s connected to. It doesn’t explain why grouping-in the Play:3 resolves it, however.

As the others have suggested, I recommend you get in touch with our technical support team, who will be able to do some real-time troubleshooting with you.

Something easy to try first, however, would be to remove the ethernet connection to the Playbase and wire the Play:3 directly to the router instead. Put the Play:3 in charge of the group (select it first) and test. If that fixes the issue, you may want to keep the Play:3 there, have a new speaker there, or have a Boost permanently wired there instead. Having said that, I definitely recommend you get in touch with technical support before spending any money.

Thanks @Corry P , impressed by the service. As an update from my side, I noticed that when leaving the 2 rooms playing over an evening (living room group with the wired Playbase and Kitchen Play:3), at some point the problem recurred and sound was only coming from the Playbase in the living room and the Play:3 in the kitchen. 

Assuming it is the connection to the extender (the Magic 2) that is the issue, how can it be resolved? I use the Magic 2 because the internet comes into our house on another floor, and I have no connection points on the floor where my Sonos set-up is. What would a Boost do and how would I connect it? Does that get connected to the Magic 2 on the floor with my set-up, or on the other floor where the router and internet source is? 

Seems strange that it is not receiving enough data, as the diagnostics for the Magic 2 shows a fairly strong data stream. 

In terms of the technical team - is that online or phone support that is best?

Thanks again

By phone in your case.

Well, that makes a bit more sense (assuming there’s a “not” missing in that sentence, as I suspect).

As with a speaker, we would prefer it if you wired a Boost directly to the router - it simplifies the connection, and reduces the number of “hops” incoming traffic makes (or at least keeps as many hops on Sonos as possible). When you wish to extend the reach of your WiFi signal, we recommend the use of a WiFi Mesh system as they back-haul on a separate connection and thus don’t half the available bandwidth. I don’t think powerline products half the bandwidth, but they are subject to external influences that other networking products aren’t. 

I can’t really comment on this - I only see Sonos performance statistics in the diagnostics, and they blame the source data path.

I recommend a call - it’s much quicker for a troubleshooting session. Once a chat’s troubleshooting gets really involved the agent is expected to pass you on to the phone lines, so you may as well start there.

I’d suspected the source data was choking, but the behaviour of the other players in the household was odd.

FWIW I have experience of Devolo Magic 1. The Magic 2 is supposed to offer up to 2400 Mbps (raw), and the display of ‘only’ ~300 Mbps data rate is distinctly low. It suggests it could be struggling quite a bit.

I would be wary of those claims - 2.4x faster than a dedicated, twisted-pair ethernet cable (or just as fast as 2.5Gb ethernet which has barely made it into the home market) seems unlikely. I assume this is in laboratory conditions with brand-new mains wiring and few other devices on the circuit. This is of course my personal opinion and not that of Sonos, and I have no experience with the device so I could be completely wrong.

Sonos is unlikely to saturate the network bandwidth with a single stream (even 24bit) to two devices so it may not even be down to bandwidth, but to something else (even 300Mbit is 3x faster than the ethernet sockets on Sonos devices) - the majority of the time (that I could see - about 20 min) the Playbase wasn’t reporting any problems. I think therefore that there may be something happening periodically that’s interrupting the stream - this could be something on the network, or something plugged into the mains power circuit (like a refrigerator, vacuum cleaner, LED ligh dimmers, etc.) which is exactly why we don’t support Powerline: there’s just too much scope for something to go wrong. 

A raw data rate of 300 Mbps would imply a usable throughput of maybe 120 Mbps. My point was that the OP’s 300 figure was distinctly low (I see twice that for the “up to 1200 Mbps” Magic 1), suggesting that the powerline technology could be fighting with the electrical cabling layout and/or interference, and hence be prone to spike interruptions. 

So, yes, EoP really is the luck of the draw. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.