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Trending Lyricist I
October 30, 2021

Starting a week ago, Amazon Music no longer works on my Sonos 1 system!!

  • October 30, 2021
  • 37 replies
  • 4512 views

Starting about a week ago, I can no longer play Amazon Music on Pandora. Specifically:

  • Everything seems OK; I can see all stations, suggested play lists, and so on
  • But: When I play anything, it takes a long time to connect, then it plays for a few seconds, but only on one of my (7) speakers/amplifiers/rooms, switching back and forth between them
  • Eventually, after a few seconds, or sometimes right from the start it says: Insufficient connection speed to play

However, I have 300Mps speed confirmed through the house, and Pandora plays just fine. I also confirmed that I can play Amazon music through the laptop without any problems. 

 

Any idea how to troubleshoot this? I already disconnected and then reconnected (added back) the Amazon service to Sonos 1 (I was an early adopter, so all my equipment is the old equipment). 

Any ideas? Anything to do with Amazon’s latest offer of “HD” (not sure exactly what that is)

Greatly appreciate advice!

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37 replies

November 7, 2021

If you are playing a lossless (HD) stream from Amazon Music then this might be a factor. It seems to have been for a few other users. Using Alexa or playing from the AM app doesn't use lossless. Hence my curiosity about those possibilities. 

You mentioned HD in your original post. Do you know if you have this? If so can you go back to playing a standard stream?

THill182Author
Trending Lyricist I
November 7, 2021

so this is interesting: I am currently subscribed to Amazon limitless; just googled if I can remove HD from it, and while it says you can on an amazon FAQ site, I don’t see that option.

So if I cancel Unlimited (which includes Amazon HD), can I still get Amazon stations on Sonos (which only lists “Amazon Music Service”!) as a regular Amazon Prime member? Is Sonos using Amazon Unlimited HD, or just Amazon Standard Music Service, by default...

 

That might be it….

Ken_Griffiths
November 7, 2021

I subscribe to Amazon Music HD/UltraHD, but I’m over in the U.K. so not sure I can really comment or compare with the service in the area where you are, but it’s been okay here in recent weeks - I have quite a few devices about the Home, but I rarely play to more than 3 physical rooms, which usually equates to 4, or occasionally 5, Sonos Rooms and that plays okay here.

The ISP speed from my ISP is 200MB/s download and 20MB/s upload. 

I do have the choice to either run my devices on SonosNet, or on the WiFi signal and both have been okay, but these are the things I just choose to do FWIW. The detail below may not help as you have a Velop mesh setup, so I post this mainly just for info only:

  • If running on WiFi, I set the routers 2.4Ghz band at ‘fixed’ channel 11 (the second least used non-overlapping channel) and the channel-width to 20MHz only.
  • When running on SonosNet, I only ever wire one device (Sonos Port) direct to the main router and that is more that 1.5 metres away from the router on SonosNet Channel 1 (The least used channel here). In this setup, I do remove my 2.4Ghz Wifi band from the Sonos App Network settings, but leave the 5Ghz band in place as I need that for use with my Move/Roam speakers. If I didn’t have those then all the WiFi credentials would be removed.
  • I also reserve all the Sonos IP addresses in my routers DHCP reservation table. I prefer to set them high up in the subnet, starting at 192.xx.xx.150 —> and higher, but that’s mostly my own preference.

In wired SonosNet mode, I do my level-best to keep my Sonos matrix ‘green’.. by not having anything too close to my speakers that might otherwise cause interference.

So I have no ‘other’ access points, or hubs and keep my channels ‘fixed’ so that as little as possible changes, but review the chosen wireless channels every now and again due to the closest neighbour sometimes changing their router channels from time to time.

I’m not sure if any of that may help, but post it in case it may help to provide some inspiration to check/change a few things in your own environment.

THill182Author
Trending Lyricist I
November 7, 2021

Really appreciate your comments and details. Seems like the options for Amazon are a bit different than what I see in the US. Also, I have the “oldest” S1 system, and understand that the newer S2 systems has more options and likely improvements (.e.g, more memory for sure, to deal with HD I understand). 

Anyway, it’s all stable with 5 stations for now, which is good enough (the others are in rooms that we are usually not occupying simultaneously). 

I think I may try to cancel my Amazon unlimited subscription and see what happens, using just Amazon Prime. I now suspect that is the problem, because Amazon Unlimited defaults to HD (something I can configure on my Windows Amazon Music Client APP, but not in Sonos), or so it looks to me at this point..

.

November 9, 2021

In the UK it is possible to have Amazon Unlimited without going HD (lossless). At least it was last time I looked.  Amazon Prime is a very limited streaming service.  As has been mentioned already, things may differ between countries, but make sure you know what you would be losing before you cancel Unlimited.

The problems that some people have recently had with Amazon Music HD do seem to have been associated with older Sonos speakers, especially Play:1s.

FWIW, I am also playing Amazon Music HD without a hitch on my system, but I don’t have any Play:1s (except as surround speakers) and rarely group large numbers of rooms.

THill182Author
Trending Lyricist I
November 9, 2021

Thanks again John; my subscription was going to run out tomorrow; so I just cancelled to see if I can get to the limited music services without a hitch. If I can, then I think that is the root cause. 

In Sonos S1 I see no option to disable HD quality. I can do this on my laptop, but assume that this is client-side-only configuration, not account-wide (any client) configuration (I tried to disable it on my laptop, and it made no difference). As a side note, I was a very early adopter, so practically all my equipment (including a speaker from Ikea, and two integrated speakers from Sonos, Sonos) are S1 and “old” (but with system software updated). 

 At some point I may contact Sonos support again by phone or chat -- but last time that wasn’t useful (hence the earlier rant; they take me through a check list of turning stuff off/on and resetting things, even though I have done all that and told them so; so it takes a long time to get anything useful out of them if at all). 

Will follow up in a week or two once my Amazon Unlimited subscription has lapsed...

November 10, 2021

I don’t think this is an S1 vs S2 issue at all.  Sonos has been capable of playing lossless files from the very start.  

Speakers are not S1 or S2.  They are compatible with S1 only, with S2 only, or with both S1 and S2.  Ikea speakers are compatible with S1 and S2, as are Play:1s and Play:3s.

I have S1 and S2 systems, and both can play lossless tracks from Amazon Music Unlimited HD.

THill182Author
Trending Lyricist I
November 10, 2021

I know I have a number of components that are not S2 compatible: I tried to update to S2 and a number of my components failed the compatibility check.

But I come back to the key symptom: “Traveling music”, that moves from room/station to room/station, but only when I simultaneously stream to all or most rooms/stations from Amazon Music (a music station, play list, ...) only, sometimes accompanied by different error messages on my Windows-based controller (indicating that the internet connection is too slow, or that the file format is corrupted, or just “cannot play”/”something went wrong”). Everything else works fine, and my Wifi has download speeds typically better than 100Mbps++ (in my previous home I had <50Mbps with identical hardware, including the Velop Mesch Wifi, and it worked fine, including Amazon Music….). 

This strongly indicates to me that something changed with Amazon music, how it is delivered to my system, or the format in which it is delivered. 

As I wrote, my Amazon Unlimited music expires today. I’ll try again in a week to see if that made a difference. It said on the Amazon website that Unlimited delivers music in HD format, while regular Amazon Prime music does not. So that is an unambiguous test of the root cause, if that is it (and if not I’ll re-subscribe, because it is a great service while travelling/driving).

PS: I am also surprised that nobody else is reporting exactly this problem, although I have read many threads which appear to describe similar issues, sometimes traced to HD music.

PS 2: At some point I may need to find a few hours during the week to call back Sonos support to see if I cannot ask them to search deeper into their issues-database that they must maintain internally...

Ken_Griffiths
November 10, 2021

@THill182,

As mentioned earlier I’m in the U.K. (so that’s already a difference perhaps by itself), but I too subscribe to the Amazon HD/Ultra HD unlimited service (and Prime) and it’s been okay here the last couple of days running on S2, but I have setup a Play:1 speaker to run on the S1 Sonos App and so will try that here for you for a few hours and let you know how that goes and report back.

Ken_Griffiths
November 10, 2021

Anyhow, to try to assist with this reported issue,  I selected an Amazon Playlist called ‘Chilled Hits’, just at random, as it had 50 assorted tracks by various artists  …and I set that playing around 12.50 hrs local time (or thereabouts) on the S1 Play:1 and it’s still playing as we speak (15.05 hours)

I grabbed  a screenshot after approx. 2 hours playback and a diagnostic report from the S1 setup; 572545676 just for good measure.

None of the tracks have stopped playing and no interruptions or error (network or encoding) messages seen so far.

All seems to be ok with Amazon Music on the S1 system here in the U.K., but I will keep things playing and will go onto try other playlists/tracks. (Let me have suggestions of a playlist/tracks to try, perhaps?)

I obviously cannot rule out that the issue might be a local issue with the AM service of course.