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