sonos arc surround not playing well with Alexa

  • 3 December 2023
  • 4 replies
  • 42 views
J
Badge +4

I’m having an issue with my arc and surrounds when I start music using Alexa. I have a number of Sonos speakers:

  1. surround upstairs 
  2. bathroom play 1
  3. basement play 1
  4. Arc+300s+sub Living Room

When I create an Alexa group with all four and say Play “name of the group,” I can see in the Sonos app that all four have been triggered to play. The problem is, it’s only actually playing on the first 3. 
 

I tried a separate test where I asked Alexa to just play it on #4. Again, it looks like it’s playing but there is no sound, even when I crank it to 100.

 

Now, if I do the exact same thing and start a song either individually on #4 or as a group using the Sonos app, everything plays as expected. I have no idea how to fix this. I’ve changed the name of the group in Alexa. I unplugged my arc and reconfigured it, then put the surrounds and sub into the surround bond again

. No matter what I do, Alexa does the same thing - the music appears to play on all four, but it’s only three.

 

One interesting thing is that it treats #1-3 as “speakers in the group,” but #4 is “other speakers.” This seemed odd to me.

Any advice?

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4 replies

Jamie A
Userlevel 7
Badge +16

Hi @Jonnydrama32,

It might be the Era 300s that are part of the 4th selection that is causing this issue, Amazon hasn’t enabled the Era 300 to be in Alexa controlled groups so it’s likely this is the cause. If you remove the Era 300s and test again, does it allow you to play with the Arc and Sub or do you still have the same issue?

Currently we’re waiting on Amazon enabling this for the Era 100 and Era 300, but we don’t have an ETA on when this will be enabled.

If you still have issues after removing the Era 300s, I would suggest reaching out to our support team for further troubleshooting, as you may be experiencing a different issue.

I hope this information helps!

J
Badge +4

There are seemingly multiple issues.

 

  1. I have four groups of speakers (Basement - Play:1, Bathroom - Play:1, Bedroom - Playbar and two play:1s for surround, media room - Arc + 2 300s + Sub). When I say “Alexa play music in ‘bathroom’ or ‘Bedroom’,” it plays without issue. If I do the same for the other two, I get “on media room/basement is offline.” Why would this happen?
  2. When I make a group containing all four and use Apple Music, it plays on all four - or so it says - but is actually only playing on everything but media room. There is a bug here because if I use the same command and use Amazon music it plays on all four. Someone else mentioned this issue months ago but clearly they don’t care to fix it.
Jamie A
Userlevel 7
Badge +16

Hi @Jonnydrama32,

Those seems like different issues and it’s likely they are a wider network related issue. However I don’t have the answer for these as they’re quite specific issues, at least not without a diagnostics after they occur.

I would recommend a general network and system reboot, by powering off your router, Sonos speakers, and controller running the Sonos app in that order. It’s also work checking if you meet our network requirements, as not meeting or having unsupported networking equipment can cause issues when using them with Sonos.

Submitting a diagnostics and reaching out to technical support would be my recommended action, as live troubleshooting would be the best to sort out these problems, as well as these issues seeming easy to reproduce.

J
Badge +4

The reason it’s hard to diagnose is because Sonos has so many bugs that everything is a major troubleshooting endeavor. Just basic stuff, like telling Alexa to play music everywhere, turns out to be an issue. Why? Well, if you play around enough you realize that it’s because using that command with Apple Music is problematic but not any other service.

I previously had two problematic Arcs that were shipped by Sonos and they made my life a living hell trying to return them. I had to wait on Tier 3 support, who told me the issue was that there were only two logistics people left at the company, which is why everything was so broken. That person then ghosted me. I sent the Arcs back and never got a refund. Had to get my CC involved.

I emailed the CEO several times and got no response even though Sonos puts his email on the website for customers to connect with.

All of this speaks to Sonos’ customer service, and it’s why I don’t want to continually call and get passed around to people based overseas who can rarely actually fix a problem and more often create a headache. Sorry, but for anyone who’s dealt extensively with Sonos CS, it’s an absolute nightmare.

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