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I bought new ERA 100 speakers and suddenly AirPlay stopped working in several speakers/rooms all the time. It was total chaos and I hated Sonos.

Sonos Setup: Arc, with sun and satellites. 2 ERA 100 in Stereo pair, Move and two ikea speakers in two different rooms.

WiFi setup: Ubiquity UniFi with Wifi 6 APs and USG Pro.

I spent ALOT of time troubleshooting and started to get crazy, when I finally seemed to have found a viable solution. Sonos is apparently extremely picky with the frequencies and WiFi settings in general, but what solved it for me was to:

  1. Set the WiFi channel to 1, 6 or 11 depending on what channel you’ve set the Sonos net to (it should not be the same) 
  2. Set the channel width to 20mhz. 
     
  3. Lock the speakers to a certain WiFi-accesspoint (wifi hardware) in the UniFi portal. 
     
  4. Disable the 5 GHz frequencies on that particular accesspoint. So EVERY speaker stream on the same bandwidth (2,4Ghz in my case, but I suppose you could force them all to 5ghz also, but I have other IOT stuff that needs the 2,4ghz)

Since I’ve done these settings, all of my speakers appear in my Airplay list, and streams flawlessly with Airplay 2. 

Hi ​@simonsimonsson 

Welcome to the Sonos Community!

Thanks for sharing your findings!

Generally, those changes you made should not have made any difference to how Sonos works with AirPlay, so I do wonder if it is related to your Ubiquiti network, though I do not recall hearing such reports before.

I am glad to hear that things have improved for you since making those changes, however - thanks again for sharing!

 

Well my experiance this far is, as long as I saw in the Unifi portal that the speaker was connected on the 5GHz band, it never showed up in the Airplay menu in either of our phones or tablets. But as soon as I locked the AP to 2,4Ghz and the two ERA speakers, they kept appear.

And frankly, I’ve had alot of problems lately since a couple of Sonos updates ago, with primarely my sonos Move. So this was a welcome find. But I dont understand how you can have so much problems with this, if you mind the price of your products and the long lasting experiance you should have in the matter. There are ALOT of threads out there on both reddit, hifi forums, ubiquiti forums, facebook etc. with alot of airplay issues. So I’m not especially unique.  

Hi ​@simonsimonsson 

Well my experiance this far is, as long as I saw in the Unifi portal that the speaker was connected on the 5GHz band, it never showed up in the Airplay menu in either of our phones or tablets. But as soon as I locked the AP to 2,4Ghz and the two ERA speakers, they kept appear.

That is up to your router - the interface (wireless band) used is entirely separate and unrelated to the protocol (AirPlay) in use. AirPlay should be able to find any compatible device on the network regardless of how devices connect to the network - it’s basically the definition of a network. If two devices cannot communicate across different interfaces, that is for your router or other equipment (like a managed switch) to sort out.

And frankly, I’ve had alot of problems lately since a couple of Sonos updates ago, with primarely my sonos Move. So this was a welcome find. But I dont understand how you can have so much problems with this, if you mind the price of your products and the long lasting experiance you should have in the matter. There are ALOT of threads out there on both reddit, hifi forums, ubiquiti forums, facebook etc. with alot of airplay issues. So I’m not especially unique.  

I’m sorry to hear of the issues you have been having, and I am glad to hear that things have gotten better for you, but you’ve already just proved to me that the issue you experienced was due to your router isolating bands, so I am not sure how someone else’s problems are related to the one you just fixed by adjusting settings on your router (please check your router for such a setting - band isolation - and disable it if you find it, as doing so should negate the need to have the speakers on the same bands). If your Ubiquiti router behaves in this fashion, it does not surprise me to hear that the same issue is described on their forums.

There are many settings available on Ubiquiti routers - I recommend you call in to our support team to see if any of it can be improved for you.

I hope this helps.

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