Sound Interruptions with some speakers in party mode

Try turning off the Quality of Service (QoS) feature and disable Airtime Fairness for both 2.4 and 5GHz bands in the router’s settings.

I have had similar experience and it happens mostly when I am streaming through Airplay. I have grouped the devices in the room (one Play 5 and three Play One SL). One of the Play One SL is wired and the other Sonos devices are wireless.

Hi @el rubio 

I recommend you always stream Airplay to the wired SL. Also, make sure the phone has a good WiFi signal. Rebooting your router by removing power for 30 seconds may also help.

I hope this helps.

thank you @Corry P for the feedback and I will consider to use the wired devices in the first place - I am less ‘enthusiastic’ about rebooting my router each time, since I have other users that are less concerned about Sonos’ behaviour and do not like their connections being cut 

Hi @el rubio 

If your router was supplied by your Internet Provider, I’d reboot it about 4 to 6 times a year. With better routers, you can get away with much longer, but I’d still recommend a reboot a couple of times a year. I wasn’t suggesting you do so every time you want to use AirPlay - that would be intolerable.

If your router needs rebooting often, you may want to look into replacing it. However, I’d make sure that this is the problem first - 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. It may just be some configuration is in order - for example, have you assigned static IPs for Sonos devices, as mentioned by @j3r3m in their original post?

Finally, if your music source is Amazon Music and you have an Unlimited account with them, you’ve likely been switched to HD playback (lossless compression, but still CD quality) without realising. This uses 4x as much bandwidth on your local network when grouping, and you may be hitting limits imposed by the speakers’ electromagnetic environment. Reducing WiFi interference in the vicinity of your router and Sonos devices will likely help, but how many rooms you can successfully play to will be reduced when playing HD content, in relation to when playing lossy compression codecs (this limit may be more rooms than you actually have, however).

I hope this helps.

hi @Corry P 

I never rely on the ISP’s router and always connect to my private router. In most cases (read: places) these are Netgear routers with dd-wrt firmware and that works very well. In one case my wifi is UniFi gear with meshed access points and an Ubiquity Security Gateway. Despite the fact they are more expensive products, the UniFi gear does not perform as well as the Netgear routers. However, its UniFi Controller software gives lots of information about the wifi usage. Internet bandwidth (on the 1 Gb fiber connection) and wifi throughput is not an issue. IP address reservation for the Sonos devices is in place. Wifi coverage throughout the premise is perfect and serving about thirty devices simultaneously. 

Hi @el rubio 

The majority of devices on your network probably only talk to the internet, or if talking to each other do so with tiny amounts of information (like a smart home light turning on). These devices working well do not necessarily indicate a heathy local network. The way Sonos communicates often highlights network issues that other devices do not.

Please recreate the playback issue, immediately submit a diagnostic and reply here with the number given when convenient. Thanks. Hopefully, that will let us get to a resolution.

Thanks @Corry P I will consider this. On the other hand I have had a case using a Netgear router (on dd-wrt firmware) where Sonos devices ‘behaved well’ despite a noisy wifi environment and lots of wireless (receive and transmit) packet errors. While Sonos devices responded well, other (video) streaming services to iPads and iPhones often had issues. From what I have learned in the recent posts, this is probably due to the fact that Sonos was transmitting on its own channel through the wired Sonos playbase or did I miss something?

Hi @el rubio 

Yes - a wired Sonos device will transmit it’s own WiFi signal that all other Sonos devices - except for Roam and Move - belonging to the same system will prefer over any 3rd-party WiFi connection.

In my experience, each Sonos system needs to be considered in isolation. What fixes an issue on one won’t necessarily fix a similar issue on another system - too many symptoms have multiple possible causes, and each Sonos owner’s home has a different electromagnetic environment and layout of different speakers. Without a diagnostic, I can only hand out guesses.