So, we’ve got a SONOS Playbar for 7-8 years now, and a Play:1 in the garage. It’s been working mostly flawlessly since we had it. We had a bit of issues with connectivity, but since plugging in the Playbar to ethernet and using SonosNET, it’s been pretty good.

Queue a few days ago, when my wife went to play some music in the house after not using it for awhile. She had a new phone recently, too, so it had the latest update on it from recently being setup. It refused to play, and was only playing through the Play:1 in the garage. If we try and play anything to the Playbar by itself, we get the generic error message of “something went wrong”. The Playbar occasionally would even disappear for a moment or two from the app. It does not seem to matter from where I’m playing, iTunes Library, Music, Amazon, Sonos, etc.

I started to look at it, and my phone had the same issues, even though I was still using the older version of the app. The same happens after the update to the new version (which I wish I never updated to after seeing these forums). The Playbar refuses to play anything by itself while plugged into ethernet. I know the connection to the speaker is good however, as my router detects that the unit is plugged in, and I am able to play audio to the garage speaker, which is on the SonosNET.

I tried the basic troubleshooting of restarting the unit, and restarting our network devices. No joy. I left the unit unplugged overnight last night, and started looking at it some more this morning. So far, I have discovered:

If I enable WiFi, the system seems to work fine in the app, though I lose the garage speaker as it’s not setup over WiFi.

While plugged into Ethernet, I can start playing something over both speakers, and it will play on both. I can then change it on the fly and the garage speaker will stop, and the Playbar continues to play for a random period of time. Sometimes a verse, sometimes until the end of the song, sometimes partway through the next song. Eventually, the volume increases a bit, and the song stops. The system then reverts to thinking it was playing through the Garage Speaker.

Funnily enough, I opened up the app on my older Mac (Catalina v10.15.7 - its a decade or so old, shoot me) and after the Sonos app on the Mac updated to 16.1, the system seems to work flawlessly through that.

Trying to open the app on either my wife’s or my phone immediately causes the system to lock up and stop working when we try and control anything - change volume, song, etc -- and it reverts back to acting like it did before in the app. Going back to the Sonos v16.1 on the Mac, and the system resumes working fine.

I’ve not done a full reset yet, and given it’s working fine on the 16.1 Mac App, I’m inclined not to at the moment, as this may be related to the horrible app update on the phones. Unfortunately, I can’t for sure say the app update is the problem...

Does this experience sound familiar to anyone, and have troubleshooting steps or solutions? Or is it likely related to this app disaster, and I should ride it out, just using the Mac to control my system?

Thanks!