Speakers in a Group drop out when audio switches

Yes @GLO Yoga, it looks like the 5Ghz WiFi signal could be improved in that area of the Home. Maybe move the speaker to a different location, if practicable, or blacklist/whitelist the speaker in the router settings to force it to just use the 2.4Ghz band instead and set the band to a ‘fixed’ channel 1, 6, or 11 and to use a channel-width of 20Mhz only, that’s if your router configuration pages allows you to perhaps change those things.

**Update** Well since above we changed to a dedicated 2.4ghz network. It solved the crazy skipping issue and songs will play as normal. 

Well the previous persistent problem where when you switch tracks or playlists the audio drops from certain speakers (always different) but after no more than 30 seconds everything is always resolved. Well things were working just fine, that issue on the first 30 seconds was not a big deal one that we dealt with. Things were just fine, then for whatever reason decided to add the Boost, to see if it could resolve that first 30 sec issue, it didn't lol. Things were still fine, then the power went out and ever since the audio has been super wonky.

Midway playing music, the skipping sound would happen, then the app says it couldn't connect to the products, things got weirder as we kept going. I tried turning speakers off at different times to see if it was certain speaker causing the issue like a bad connection. At one point 3 different speakers were trying to play different things at the same time, of all the issues this is a first.

I have not reserved IPs and my connection speed is a consistent 110MB of download speed.

We are back to using our JBL Extreme speaker 😥

Power outage certainly lends credence to the issue being caused by duplicate IP addresses, as the Sonos being handed ‘dirty’ IP addresses by the router when they were being rebooted. Is there a specific reason why you’ve chosen not to assign IP addresses in your router for the Sonos?

I don’t think your download speed has anything to with this issue, it’s the ability for the speakers to connect to your router which is the main concern here. Which means either duplicate IP addresses, or some sort of wifi interference .

There is always the extremely low chance of a hardware failure, which is why the previous recommendation for the diagnostic and a call to Sonos to discuss it. 

Please try setting allocated ip addresses. It’s a step that’s  fixed problems for so many folk…
 

Following your power outage it’s also worth powering down all your Sonos devices and your router. Restarting them should ensure “clean” ip addresses for your system. Reboot the router first and be sure to wait until wifi is fully established before starting Sonos devices one at a time. 
 

Why come on these forums and ask for help if you’re not willing to try what’s suggested? 

I’ve just looked at the other thread you started on this topic, a year ago. In it, you say the problem goes away when you restart the whole system. This does add to the likelihood of duplicate ip addresses being the problem; allocating ip addresses will eliminate the occurrence of duplicate ip addresses. If it doesn’t solve your problem it will at least take one unknown out of the equation and get you one step closer to a resolution. 
 

You also say, a year ago in that other thread, that you will try setting ip addresses…

Took me five minutes to set my Sonos addresses to static/reserved from my router’s DHCP server settings page and it ended several very frustrating issue.

It is worth the time to try it, even if it doesn’t help it hurts nothing and takes a whole class of potential issues off the table.

100% agree with setting up with IP addresses, this will be done today.

So the question of why didn't I already do this, well a very good question but here is the answer, thought it was a lengthy process and that everytime I was going to do that the audio seems to start to work, so I kept saying leave well enough alone. Well that was not a good idea clearly.

Taking all that info, there is still something I can't square and setting up the IPs might not answer this I don't believe, we have a playlist called "Yin Yoga" on Sonos and whenever I play that playlist, there is never an issue not a single one. Then I switch to basically anything else and it goes south and fast immediately. Why would  a certain playlist be ok while others are not?

Still not sure how to setup the IP addresses, but I'm sure it's not rocket science so I will do that and report back with the results. 

Thank you for the feedback everyone 💯

Play the good playlist for a while then submit a diagnostic, data doesn’t go too far back so maybe 30 minutes of playing first. Note the diagnostic number.

Play a problem playlist and when it glitches send in another diagnostic, soon is good, less than 10 minutes or so.

Call Sonos with both numbers and ask what they see in the internal data we can’t see.

On the different lists, any chance the music formats on the lists are different? Heavily compressed MP3s play well even in problem environments, full resolution FLAC music is a bit pickier and if you try any of the “Better than your ears can hear” high resolution stuff it can be even more demanding of a clean RF environment.

As said, allocating ip addresses is usually quite straightforward. If you give us the router details, someone here may be able to help. It’s usually detailed in the user manual, too. 

So I am using the new Gen 3 Starlink Router, then I plugged the Netgear Nighthawk Mesh extender with main unit plugged into Starlink Router and the 2 extender cubes in the lobby and Studio. Sonos is connected to the Netgear Nighthawk (better range then Starlink router by itself)

Do I do all this in the Nighthawk app?

Thanks!