Enthusiast II

Sonos is forcing people to buy new hardware as they've broken the Connect:Amp and they refuse to fix it

Forum|Forum|2 years ago
December 31, 2023
294 replies
16586 views

Hi,

I'm recreating this thread, as the discussion wasn't finished, but it was locked. I also wanted to make it obvious this is a Sonos issue, not a client environment issue.

https://en.community.sonos.com/components-and-architectural-228999/connect-amp-keeps-dropping-out-audio-6885634/index2.html

I've been following this for a while because I've been having the same issues, and when I spoke to support they said the connect amp can't cope with modern software and that I should upgrade to the amp, which is clearly unacceptable.

This has been confirmed by people in that original thread who have been told the same thing.

BillJanzen

“FWIW, these issues seem to have occured after the June 2023 software update to S2 version 15.5. Interestingly, there is an alert posted in the release notes of the 15.6 update released July 25, 2023 about adjusting how older Sonos products use their internal memory. See below (copied from https://support.sonos.com/en-ca/article/release-notes-for-sonos-s2): Alerts: With this update, we’ve adjusted how some of our older Sonos products are using their internal memory. Because of this change, updates for Play:1, Play:3, Boost, Connect, Connect:Amp, and Sub (Gen 1 and 2) will take longer to complete than before. The reset process for these products will also take more time to complete after this update.”

BillJanzen

“We continue to have intermittent drop-outs on all 4 of our Connect:Amp devices, so here’s my update after 1.5 hours on the phone with Sonos today. They said the diagnostics for one of the Connect:Amp devices the chose to investigate showed multiple major alerts, including: Cannot allocate memory to full status Write failed Player crashed: out of memory OOM Killer These items all sound like they are related to memory issues with the older Connect:Amp product, as Big Bull mentioned in his previous post.”

Big Bull:

“Ok latest is I powered down 3 of my 4 units and just had the one I use most running hard wired to the router through my switch and it still gave dropouts so I sent 2 diagnostics to Sonos and they said :

------------------

Thanks, so on this one in specific I can see the audio interruptions are caused because the product basically is old, and it is reaching its capabilities, there are some things that can be done to try to reduce the impact of this, but if it continues this product will need to be replaced with the upgrade program.

-------------------

I am being advised to replace any affected units with the Sonos Amp which can be costly.”

Birchan

“ Same problem, 4 AMP of which two lose sound... SONOS did a wrong analysis and accidentally said that there were memory failures in some of the units. But since they only give a 2-year warranty, mine was 2.5 years too old. How can SONOS sell products that obviously have manufacturing problems and then say that they can replace them with a 30% discount on new ones? Wonder if Tesla would sell cars that stop working after 2 years and say, sorry you have to buy a new car every two years because the warranty has expired. So bad from SONOS so I will be discontinuing my SONOS system and switching to BOSE... “

For context, in my situation I have a connect amp, connected via ethernet with WiFi off, and I started to get regular drop outs around June. It's incredibly annoying, the audio will drop out for a few seconds before continuing, if other speakers are grouped they will carry on fine.

It's absolutely 100% not a network issue. When I was debugging it, I briefly made the connect amp the only wired device and turned on WiFi, and other speakers in my house worked perfectly at all times. I've also reserved IP addresses, and I ran a ping monitor on it to check for any network dropouts. There were none. I've put the system back now, so the connect amp has its WiFi off.

So it seems to me that Sonos have released a firmware update that the connect amp cannot handle, and rather than take responsibility for it, they're just fobbing people off telling them to buy expensive new hardware to solve the problem, not even with any substantial discount. It's unacceptable. This connect amp worked perfectly before June.

Sonos needs to release a new update that solves the issue, or give people affected substantial discounts on replacement amps, and formally announce that the connect amp is end of life. Currently people with issues on this forum are being unintentionally gaslighted by well meaning people who don't know that this issue exists. Sonos cannot say the connect amp is supported when they've released a broken update.

People need to know about this issue, I've seen loads of topics about this issue and people get fobbed off with network issues, which is absolutely not the case, at all. Big Bull proved this by doing a replacement to amps which solved his issue.

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.

Pinned Reply By Corry P

Hi @britcowboy

Thanks for bringing this back to my attention.

We now consider this issue to be largely resolved, and any remaining cases are being dealt with on an individual basis. If you still encounter the issue described here, I recommend you get in touch with our technical support team who have tools at their disposal that will allow them to give you advice specific to your Sonos system and what it reports.

I hope this helps.

Show previous replies

B

britcowboyAuthor

Enthusiast II

We have a Sonos Connect connected to a Denon Amp via optical connection. The Denon is connected to hard wired speakers throughout the house. It worked wonderfully for six years until about six months ago. We also have the cutting out problem. Sometimes we get several hours without a drop, other times it drops every few minutes. I actually installed a new router several months ago after being led to believe it was a network problem. That did not solve the problem. I have the Sonos on a dedicated wireless port. I have tried using different channels on the advice of Sonos support. Nothing has solved the problem. I agree that this is a problem caused by the Sonos hardware upgrades. Can anyone tell me how can I revert my Connect back to pre upgrade when it worked without any problems? We are retired and on a fixed income and I really do not want to throw good money after bad.

Thank you!

I’ve reverted my two connect amps back to S1. The procedure for doing this is documented here

Although it seems simple, it isn’t foolproof and it took a few goes to re-establish the amps on the network via the S1 app (it took some time for my iPhone to establish the necessary wifi connection to the connect amps).

It’s early days (only been a few hours!) but so far, so good.

A word of caution - you’ll lose all settings associated with your account such as streaming services and music library paths. These will all need to be re-established again.

And once you’ve reverted to S1, you’ll have to tell all the users in your house to avoid the constant Sonos reminder to upgrade to S2 (there’s no way to remove this reminder if you only have S2 compatible devices in your network)

Happy for you if it fixes it for you, but imo this isn't the solution. I have 7 Sonos devices, all on S2, and don't want the rest of the network hobbled because of this device, plus I did have plans to buy an Arc this year, which won't work on S1, although I'm not in a rush to buy it until this issue is resolved.

I appreciate that it’s of limited practical use to you if the reversion to S1 fixes the problem but at least it will prove that the problem is software related rather than network or hardware related.

As it stands, I haven’t noticed any loss of functionality going back to S1. In fact, functionality has improved as the network has been streaming for five hours with no glitches and the app control is much more responsive!

Oh yeah I totally agree, sorry I wasn't being funny with you, it's a very helpful data point, but just want to make sure we don't let Sonos off the hook

B

britcowboyAuthor

Enthusiast II

I don’t think that Sonos is deliberately setting out to sabotage devices but the careless coding of new firmware updates is having the same effect.

You have not a shred of evidence for this assertion. The facts simply do not support it. In particular, the tiny number of users who have supported this claim. On the very rare occasions that an update has introduce a bug, even one affecting a tiny proportion of users, there have been dozens, even hundreds, of users posting within days.

Hello again, I've been going through the top 3 or 4 pages of this forum, and I already found these issues with either symptoms identical to this issue, or, mention being told memory is a problem on the connect amp. Most of them are told its an issue with their environment.

https://en.community.sonos.com/components-and-architectural-228999/connect-amp-interference-6888559?postid=16697899

https://en.community.sonos.com/components-and-architectural-228999/trouble-with-sonos-port-and-app-6888579 memory done and gone on connect (not amp)

https://en.community.sonos.com/components-and-architectural-228999/amp-port-or-used-connect-amp-6888542?postid=16697902#post16697902

https://en.community.sonos.com/components-and-architectural-228999/audio-dropouts-connect-amp-6886487

https://en.community.sonos.com/components-and-architectural-228999/connect-2-amp-losing-network-6887862

So can we stop with people claiming hardly anyone has reported this issue?

Interestingly the last post, Sonos acknowledged there is an issue with memory on the connect amp they are investigating. Can someone from Sonos weigh in here?

A

ANOpax

Enthusiast II

And here’s another one

https://en.community.sonos.com/components-and-architectural-228999/connect-keeps-dropping-audio-disappears-from-app-6886389?tid=6886389&fid=228999

J

JEDward

Contributor I

Good Morning All,

I registered this morning to throw my hat into the “connect AMP dropout” pile. My symptoms are similar though I’ve yet to run the traps with Sonos support to find out why. I’ve got one Connect Amp on my system powering two hardwired landscape speakers.

The summer 2023 timeline sounds about right.

melvimbe

I suspect that the issue doesn’t impact all Connect:Amps in every situation. It could very well be that a particular batch/run of Connect:Amps has memory that isn’t holding up as well as others. Or perhaps when the Connect:Amp is in a larger system, or playing a stream with certain characteristics, it has these issues.. This would explain why we are not seeing the volume of complaints you’d expect if every Connect:Amp in the wild was impacted, and why the issue was not discovered in testing prior to release.

It should be mentioned that dropout are a symptom of quite a lot of different issues. The most common issue we see around here is network setup. So that’s why people tend to address that potential issue first. Also, you can’t assume that anyone who has a Connect:Amp and drop out issues has this hardware issue.

Regardless of any of that, if Sonos support is saying the hardware can’t handle the software they provided, I would be looking to get something from Sonos as a replacement. I believe you can get a 30% discount on upgrade even if you’re not experiencing issues with your legacy equipment. I don’t know if asking for a full replacement, or better discount, is realistic considering the device is out of warranty, and you’ve gotten years of service out of it already. Then again, I understand why people don’t want to pay anything to upgrade a device they were perfectly happy with.

Danny

B

britcowboyAuthor

Enthusiast II

I suspect that the issue doesn’t impact all Connect:Amps in every situation. It could very well be that a particular batch/run of Connect:Amps has memory that isn’t holding up as well as others. Or perhaps when the Connect:Amp is in a larger system, or playing a stream with certain characteristics, it has these issues.. This would explain why we are not seeing the volume of complaints you’d expect if every Connect:Amp in the wild was impacted, and why the issue was not discovered in testing prior to release.

It should be mentioned that dropout are a symptom of quite a lot of different issues. The most common issue we see around here is network setup. So that’s why people tend to address that potential issue first. Also, you can’t assume that anyone who has a Connect:Amp and drop out issues has this hardware issue.

Regardless of any of that, if Sonos support is saying the hardware can’t handle the software they provided, I would be looking to get something from Sonos as a replacement. I believe you can get a 30% discount on upgrade even if you’re not experiencing issues with your legacy equipment. I don’t know if asking for a full replacement, or better discount, is realistic considering the device is out of warranty, and you’ve gotten years of service out of it already. Then again, I understand why people don’t want to pay anything to upgrade a device they were perfectly happy with.

I know why people are told it could be their network, but internally at Sonos this is a known issue, so it's a bit annoying when it's likely to be this issue.

The device was working perfectly until summer 23, so I don't want to buy a new (expensive) device, during a cost of living crisis, when it appears to be an issue Sonos has introduced with new firmware.

melvimbe

I suspect that the issue doesn’t impact all Connect:Amps in every situation. It could very well be that a particular batch/run of Connect:Amps has memory that isn’t holding up as well as others. Or perhaps when the Connect:Amp is in a larger system, or playing a stream with certain characteristics, it has these issues.. This would explain why we are not seeing the volume of complaints you’d expect if every Connect:Amp in the wild was impacted, and why the issue was not discovered in testing prior to release.

It should be mentioned that dropout are a symptom of quite a lot of different issues. The most common issue we see around here is network setup. So that’s why people tend to address that potential issue first. Also, you can’t assume that anyone who has a Connect:Amp and drop out issues has this hardware issue.

Regardless of any of that, if Sonos support is saying the hardware can’t handle the software they provided, I would be looking to get something from Sonos as a replacement. I believe you can get a 30% discount on upgrade even if you’re not experiencing issues with your legacy equipment. I don’t know if asking for a full replacement, or better discount, is realistic considering the device is out of warranty, and you’ve gotten years of service out of it already. Then again, I understand why people don’t want to pay anything to upgrade a device they were perfectly happy with.

I know why people are told it could be their network, but internally at Sonos this is a known issue, so it's a bit annoying when it's likely to be this issue.

The device was working perfectly until summer 23, so I don't want to buy a new (expensive) device, during a cost of living crisis, when it appears to be an issue Sonos has introduced with new firmware.

Disagree regarding your first comment. If someone is complaining about network drop outs with their Connect:Amp, it’s most likely to be a network. At the very least, network issues should be eliminated before assuming it’s a hardware problem.

Danny

K

Kumar

The device was working perfectly until summer 23, so I don't want to buy a new (expensive) device, during a cost of living crisis, when it appears to be an issue Sonos has introduced with new firmware.

I get the cost of living thing; one way to repurpose the Sonos device is wiring something like an Echo Dot to the line in jacks. All you need then is for the Sonos controller to talk to it once such that you can set up the line in on the Connect Amp for autoplay. Once that is done, the Connect Amp will deliver full amp functionality with the Echo Dot as a front end, replacing Sonos, whenever it gets a signal from the wired to line in Echo. And the Echo will even accept Spotify casting if you don’t care for the voice thing.

If you can land an older Echo Show 5/8 that has audio out jacks, you will even get a feature that S2 does not offer - album art for the music that is playing.

What you will not be able to do via this workaround is access music on a NAS.

A

ANOpax

Enthusiast II

I suspect that the issue doesn’t impact all Connect:Amps in every situation. It could very well be that a particular batch/run of Connect:Amps has memory that isn’t holding up as well as others. Or perhaps when the Connect:Amp is in a larger system, or playing a stream with certain characteristics, it has these issues.. This would explain why we are not seeing the volume of complaints you’d expect if every Connect:Amp in the wild was impacted, and why the issue was not discovered in testing prior to release.

It should be mentioned that dropout are a symptom of quite a lot of different issues. The most common issue we see around here is network setup. So that’s why people tend to address that potential issue first. Also, you can’t assume that anyone who has a Connect:Amp and drop out issues has this hardware issue.

Regardless of any of that, if Sonos support is saying the hardware can’t handle the software they provided, I would be looking to get something from Sonos as a replacement. I believe you can get a 30% discount on upgrade even if you’re not experiencing issues with your legacy equipment. I don’t know if asking for a full replacement, or better discount, is realistic considering the device is out of warranty, and you’ve gotten years of service out of it already. Then again, I understand why people don’t want to pay anything to upgrade a device they were perfectly happy with.

I know why people are told it could be their network, but internally at Sonos this is a known issue, so it's a bit annoying when it's likely to be this issue.

The device was working perfectly until summer 23, so I don't want to buy a new (expensive) device, during a cost of living crisis, when it appears to be an issue Sonos has introduced with new firmware.

Disagree regarding your first comment. If someone is complaining about network drop outs with their Connect:Amp, it’s most likely to be a network. At the very least, network issues should be eliminated before assuming it’s a hardware problem.

The trouble is that what could be a firmware issue is being dismissed (quite rudely in some cases) by forum members as a network issue because the symptoms look the same and network issues are the most common source of problems.

It’s only when we get Sonos Help involved that they can discount network issues and interrogate the offending connect amp units to show that there is a memory issue.

However, there is no willingness on Sonos’ part to solve this problem - and this is for hardware which was only discontinued four years ago. The message now is to buy new hardware. But how long will that be good for? Another four years? I don’t have the wherewithal to be spending $1,500 (after 15% upgrade discount) on a couple of Sonos Amps every four years.

My rollback to S1 has been glitch free for the last ten hours so here’s hoping that I just saved $1,500.

However, people who have to stick to S2 for other reasons won’t be so fortunate.

melvimbe

Disagree regarding your first comment. If someone is complaining about network drop outs with their Connect:Amp, it’s most likely to be a network. At the very least, network issues should be eliminated before assuming it’s a hardware problem.

The trouble is that what could be a firmware issue is being dismissed (quite rudely in some cases) by forum members as a network issue because the symptoms look the same and network issues are the most common source of problems.

The vast majority of times, these are network problems, despite people claiming that they know there is nothing wrong with theirr network. I guess I’m understanding a bit of skepticism when we see these claims. As far as them being rude, this your first day on the internet? 😀 The thread title sort of set the tone, even if OP didn’t mean to imply that Sonos was intentionally causing the issue.

It’s only when we get Sonos Help involved that they can discount network issues and interrogate the offending connect amp units to show that there is a memory issue.

Yes, because only Sonos has the tools to properly diagnose the issue.

However, there is no willingness on Sonos’ part to solve this problem - and this is for hardware which was only discontinued four years ago. The message now is to buy new hardware. But how long will that be good for? Another four years? I don’t have the wherewithal to be spending $1,500 (after 15% upgrade discount) on a couple of Sonos Amps every four years.

My rollback to S1 has been glitch free for the last ten hours so here’s hoping that I just saved $1,500.

However, people who have to stick to S2 for other reasons won’t be so fortunate.

Sonos tends to be quite about these issues. We don’t know the scope of the problem, in terms of how many units are impacted and how/if the issue can be fixed. We can’t assume that silence means their just ignoring the issue, as that has not been the case before. I’m sure some would just like to role back the change, but if the change brought in a new feature, or fixed a bigger issue, that’s not a viable option.

Danny

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