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June 10, 2021
Answered

Sonos Boost exacerbated speaker dropout issues

  • June 10, 2021
  • 24 replies
  • 872 views

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.”

24 replies

Answer
June 21, 2021

@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.”

Corry P
Sonos Staff
June 21, 2021

Hi @quadband 

I’m glad you found a solution, and thank you for sharing your findings!

I have to admit, I actually sniggered when I read the bit about the seagulls.

Mine

 

"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen." - Albert Einstein
ratty
June 21, 2021

“Zigbee won’t interfere with WiFi” is a big fat lie

Indeed.

https://www.metageek.com/training/resources/zigbee-wifi-coexistence.html

June 22, 2021

Magic. Zigbee channel 11, house 2.4 channel 2, and Sonos channel 11. The Philips Hue are only what I can describe as messy, and I would not have initially thought they’d cause so much interference sitting in the side lobe of the upper range of 2.4. I appreciate y’alls persistence and help.