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Anonymous

Answered

Sonos Boost exacerbated speaker dropout issues

Forum|Forum|5 years ago
June 10, 2021
24 replies
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I have a fairly modest Sonos setup: two Five’s in a pair with a Sub in the living room, and two One’s in a pair in the bedroom. I started experiencing dropout issues when I added the Sub. What will happen is the right Five (it’s always the right) and the Sub will start playing at the beginning of a song and almost immediately drop out. They eventually come back after about ten seconds. The left side never drops out. This would only happen when playing from a service such as Qobuz or Amazon HD. I spoke with tech support and we came to the conclusion that a Boost would help remedy the issue. I received my Boost today, plugged it in, and now the issue happens much more frequently, and on every service (Spotify specifically, where it was not happening before). My network matrix shows all green, except for the Boost itself. What is most frustrating is that, as I stated previously, none of these issues were present before I purchased the Sub. This has made using Sonos almost a chore, and caused me to seriously second guess my decision to buy into the ecosystem.

There is roughly a five foot hop from the Boost to the left Five, and the two One’s are in an adjacent room. I have no other networking issues in the house aside from my Sonos system.

Airplay 2 works fine. There are zero issues when streaming from an iOS or MacOS device.

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Best answer by

@Corry P In what I can only describe as “death by a thousand paper cuts” the Zigbee traffic in my house was obliterating certain WiFi channels. Initial reconfiguration has yielded a 13dB improvement in the noise floor (as indicated by the Boost in the matrix) and 3 points better OFDM ANI levels. I am confident I can improve this further. Despite green connections between Sonos nodes, the Boost was absolutely drowning. No more dropouts with Qobuz. 🙃

“Zigbee won’t interfere with WiFi” is a big fat lie, and apparently the Philips Hue hub isn’t smart enough to move out of the way of anything else on its own. Unplugging the hub causes the bulbs to imitate the popular seagull scene from Finding Nemo. I have *so many* Hue bulbs.

I will follow up with the conclusion after I make my final environment changes. Preliminary conclusion: “Check your Zigbee channels. Change them, probably.”

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ratty

The Boost is indeed currently sitting right under an AP node (though hardwired back to a switch in my office.) I will see about moving it. I didn’t figure that to be an issue as everything else in the matrix is green, and my AP’s employ beam forming.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near%E2%80%93far_problem

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Anonymous

The Boost is indeed currently sitting right under an AP node (though hardwired back to a switch in my office.) I will see about moving it. I didn’t figure that to be an issue as everything else in the matrix is green, and my AP’s employ beam forming.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near%E2%80%93far_problem

Uncertain how this is relevant unless all you read was the bit about it sitting underneath. The Boost is within a deep lobe null of the AP as well as having 9 channels of separation on the 2.4 band. Unless the Boost is overly susceptible to harmonics the AP is unlikely to be causing enough interference to overload its front end. I suspect the issue has more to do with my multicast situation, which I will solve.

Corry P

Sonos Staff

Hi @quadband

The floor is not a good location for anything that’s trying to transmit throughout your home. A level higher than most furniture would be better (so the signal is blocked by less mass). Some surface types (metal or glass, usually) can also make the Boost catch reflections of it’s own transmissions, which can interfere with further transmissions - but these need to be very close to have this affect.

Due to the inverse square law, however, extreme proximity to other WiFi sources is never good, regardless of the difference in exact frequencies used. An increase in physical separation between your router and Boost may be what’s needed, especially if your router is a more powerfully-transmitting one.

"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen." - Albert Einstein

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Anonymous

Hi @quadband

The floor is not a good location for anything that’s trying to transmit throughout your home. A level higher than most furniture would be better (so the signal is blocked by less mass). Some surface types (metal or glass, usually) can also make the Boost catch reflections of it’s own transmissions, which can interfere with further transmissions - but these need to be very close to have this affect.

Due to the inverse square law, however, extreme proximity to other WiFi sources is never good, regardless of the difference in exact frequencies used. An increase in physical separation between your router and Boost may be what’s needed, especially if your router is a more powerfully-transmitting one.

Here is the current setup; forgive the clutter:

Corry P

Sonos Staff

Hi @quadband

Thanks for the picture - the Boost and WiFi Access Point are far too close to each other. They need to be at least 1m (3 feet) apart. The Boost was quite clear in reporting the noise levels in the diagnostics.

Having the Boost wired directly to the main router would be our preference, even if it’s further away from the speakers - it’s best to simplify the connections when there are issues.

I hope this helps.

Edit: moving the Boost will have the added benefit of increased speed/reliability for other devices on your WiFi, as the AP is being interfered with just as much as the Boost.

"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen." - Albert Einstein

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Anonymous

Hi @quadband

Thanks for the picture - the Boost and WiFi Access Point are far too close to each other. They need to be at least 1m (3 feet) apart. The Boost was quite clear in reporting the noise levels in the diagnostics.

Having the Boost wired directly to the main router would be our preference, even if it’s further away from the speakers - it’s best to simplify the connections when there are issues.

I hope this helps.

Edit: moving the Boost will have the added benefit of increased speed/reliability for other devices on your WiFi, as the AP is being interfered with just as much as the Boost.

The Boost is wired back to the main resi-household switch. The AP is using a dedicated 5Ghz wireless backhaul and has 2.4 turned off and is only running 5Ghz. I’m betting the interference is coming from the Lutron and Philips hubs in proximity.

In the interest of solving the root issue I plan on disabling the AP and the IoT hubs and testing to see if it improves reliability of the Sub and right Five. My gut tells me no, but if that turns out to be the case I will break out the Sawzall and drill. I intend to slay the multicast beast this week.

You had mentioned grouping the speakers in a certain order; for context, does the master speaker in a group handle all the decoding and then forward the result on?

Corry P

Sonos Staff

Hi @quadband

That sounds like a good plan for troubleshooting.

The first member of a group, called the Group Coordinator, is responsible for fetching the stream, buffering for it’s own playback, and distributing it along with timing cues. Each player will buffer, decode the stream, and play at the agreed-upon millisecond.

As the Group Coordinator must communicate on the network more than others, it’s best for this speaker/room to be the one with the most reliable connection.

Edit: As the Boost only transmits on 2.4 GHz, having the AP only transmitting on 5 GHz would certainly suggest they won’t interfere with each other, so it may indeed be due to the other hubs you mentioned. With such extreme proximity, however, it’s difficult to say without the steps you’re about to try.

"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen." - Albert Einstein

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Anonymous

As a quick follow up to this post:

I removed the AP node and all hubs; simply powered them off. It made no difference. Reiterating my previous point, the left speaker never hesitates in playback. It’s connection doesn’t appear to be bad.

My takeaway from this is that the node to node bandwidth is insufficient to reliably handle Qobuz or Amazon HD. It’s unfortunate, because it means for whole home audio I am unable to utilize all of my playlists. I appreciate your assistance in helping me to try and figure the problem out.

edit: a word

Corry P

Sonos Staff

Hi @quadband

Your Fives certainly shouldn’t have any problem communicating with each other.

Could you please remove the Sub from the Living Room (in the Sonos app, not real life)? Once done, please test playback until you are happy there’s no playback issues.

If you no longer get playback issues, and are now convinced the Sub was causing the issue, then please bond the Sub back to the Living Room and try the Sub in different physical locations in the Living Room.

If you were able to get faultless playback without the Sub, but are now unable to with the Sub in any location, please remove the Sub from the Living Room in the app, then bond it to the Bedroom to test it in that room instead (you will probably need to move the Sub to the Bedroom too).

If it seems the issue follows the Sub, please remove the Sub from the Bedroom in the app, then factory reset the Sub, and set it up in the Living Room again for more testing.

Please let us know how you get on.

"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen." - Albert Einstein

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Anonymous

@Corry P Not being one to let an issue go, I borrowed an SDR from a buddy that is capable of S band RX and the results are interesting. I will follow up with the fruits of my fiddling, shortly.

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