Room with sonos AMP and Sub4 but the AMP is physically in a different room. Sub 4 connectivity issue

The sub connects to another speaker by its own dedicated 5ghz WiFi. It doesn’t act as a standalone speaker on your ‘normal’ wifi. So if it’s too far from its bonded speaker partner, it will struggle.

Don’t turn WiFi off on the amp though or the 5ghz WiFi connection to the Sub won’t work.

If all else fails, can you connect the Sub to the Amp by Ethernet?

(If I’ve misunderstood anything, apologies.)

Hi, 

Oh no I was afraid of this. Is there anyway to connect the sub 4 to the actual wifi?

The sub 4 is too far away from the amp physically. There are no data points in the room to wire the sub 4 up. There is however strong WiFi in the room from the wifi access point in the ceiling so if I could get the sub 4 to connect to the home wifi it could see the amp that is already hard wired into the home network.

Is this not possible?  

I spoke to support and I could cry :( 

They confirmed the sub 4 simply can’t connect to the wifi directly.

They said a proprietary Sonosnet “wireless device to device” system is used and the Amp need to be physically in the same room as the Sub 4.

Obviously this is no good to me since the Amp is 50 meters away the comms room so this Sonosnet wireless device to device link is useless.

Why on earth the Sub 4 can’t just connect to the wifi to see the Amp on the same LAN I do not know. 

​@soundspeaker 

Sounds like a bad situation. As far as I know in the past bonded speakers (sub and / or surround speakers) tried to use 2,4 ghz standard wifi as fallback, if the internal 5 ghz home theater wifi wasn’t available. But I don‘t know if that still is actual information. And on the other hand this fallback often didn’t work well. As you said you tried to turn off Sonos Amps wifi… so the sub imo would have tried to use that fallback connection. But obviously it also didn’t work. 
If there is no Ethernet port available next to the sub, the only (officialy not supported by Sonos) option I see, is using a wireless wifi extender that is multicast compatible, can be configured as a wireless bridge and supports an ethernet port for the Sonos Sub. 
AVM Fritz system for example supports such a setup. 
If you then turn of Amps wifi and Amp and Sub both are connected via lan cable imho this could work, as if the sub would be connected directly via lan cable to the router or an access point. These AVM products can be configured like an access point that is connected to the router via wifi. 
But again… that just would be an experiment and no official supported usecase. The partial wifi route of the data transfer between Sub and Amp would be the critical part. 
But maybe it’s worth a try. 

Thanks!

I got a long 20m network cable and ran it to the Sub 4 connected to a LAN switch and….. it works!

So I just need to get a data point wired into that room now from the comms room.

Thanks again for the advice. No more tears.

But still, why Sonos don’t allow it to work over regular wifi is a bit of a mystery. Latency wouldn’t be an issue with modern 5Ghz wifi6 / wifi7. I think Sonos developers should reconsider this since it already works on the LAN with the ethernet cable so the code is there for it to work.

​@soundspeaker 

I think the Sonos developers with an experience background of many years will have good reasons to use the dedicated home theater internal 5 ghz wifi or the ethernet lan cable connection. The standard router wifi imho can be influenced by too many factors and connection quality could be some kind of lottery. 
 

Best option in your case still is the direct lan cable connection to the router, access point or compatible (igmp snooping support) ethernet switch. 
If possible, I would try to hide the lan cable and get a permanent switch to sub cable connection. 

Agree. I’m going to assume the use case if you have a rack with amp(s) in other location(s), you are highly likely to have structured cabling to other rooms, even if they are not being used from day one, so the preferred option would be to cable the HT system.

Personally I think this was a massive oversight when Sonos released the Amp, but I get it that it makes more sense to use 5GHz when using the Amp for TV purposes. Some people however don’t use it for TV but to power built in speakers for example and in this case it would make sense to allow a 2.4GHz connection for the Sub like the old Connect:Amp could do perfectly fine.

​@Outburst 

If Sonos allowed the Sub to join the house WiFi, it would cause more issues than it solves, as many people use the Sub for home theatre. There would be people on here moaning that the Sub isn’t working in sync with the TV - but they’d be manually grouping it instead of bonding it…

And most people not using their Sub for home theatre will usually place it near the speaker they are wanting to enhance, not having the sub and speaker 50m apart…