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DunkirkPie
Enthusiast II
January 2, 2022

Deezer HiFi and Sonos - constant skips and dropouts

  • January 2, 2022
  • 13 replies
  • 755 views

I’ve had lots of problems listening to Deezer Premium on my Sonos system for the last couple of months.  Every track drops in and out (except on my Beam, which is wired to the router) for the first 10-15 seconds of playback.  It even happens when I pause and restart a track halfway through.

I had assumed this was due to wireless interference (I’ve recently added a load of IKEA smart bulbs throughout the house) but today I realised that my issues started when Deezer “upgraded” all their packages - for a price, obviously - to “HiFi audio quality sound” in October.  A bit off-topic, but in my view this was a thinly-disguised and cynical piece of opportunism from a company which put out a press release only six months earlier promising:

“We just wanted to let you know that Deezer isn’t going to raise prices in the middle of the pandemic. Music, podcasts and radio help people cope and we don’t feel this is the time to make things harder for them. If we ever were to increase prices, we would give our users a three month heads up to make sure that it doesn’t come as a surprise.”

Anyway, I’m now wondering if this (compulsory) increase in audio quality is the cause of all my issues.  Is it possible that my WiFi network is unable to cope with the increased amount of data which needs to be transmitted to enable “HiFi audio quality sound”?  Has anybody else had a similar issue?

Today I unplugged all my new IKEA smart bulbs and restarted the router, with no improvement, so that seems to have ruled out interference from them as a cause.

If this is the cause, what can I do about it?  There doesn’t seem to be an option in Deezer to “downgrade” from HiFi music, but is there an audio compression setting anywhere in my Sonos system?  Or do I just have a find a music service which doesn’t insist on charging extra for worse performance?

Setup

Upstairs - Living room, Beam wired to router; Bedroom, Symfonisk lamp

Downstairs - Study, Connect; Kitchen, 2x Play: 1

Currently disconnected - Boost (would it help if I set this up to act as an extender, or would it simply duplicate what the Beam does?)

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    13 replies

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    DunkirkPieAuthor
    Enthusiast II
    January 3, 2022

    Oh, and ignore the Boost. It wouldn’t add anything.

    Just out of interest, why is this?  Wouldn’t plugging the Boost into the router, instead of my Beam, increase performance?  And why wouldn’t having it in an otherwise empty room act as a “booster”?

    I read here (https://freetime.mikeconnelly.com/archives/6050) that:

    Contrasting the BOOST device with a Sonos speaker running in BOOST mode, the BOOST device:

    • contains 3 wireless antennae for 360 degrees of coverage and significantly more range
    • has “enterprise grade wireless performance”, and
    • has “advanced wireless interference rejection”

    Is this not true?  Or is it just out of date?

    Ken_Griffiths
    Ken_Griffiths
    January 3, 2022

    I personally thought the Sonos matrix, posted earlier, seemed pretty good. I would have maybe concentrated on finding the source of the ‘likely’ intermittent interference and seen if anything could be done instead to prevent/reduce that happening. I would have thought that would have been a better approach, than a wired setup using power-line adapters.

    ratty
    ratty
    January 3, 2022

    Oh, and ignore the Boost. It wouldn’t add anything.

    Just out of interest, why is this?  Wouldn’t plugging the Boost into the router, instead of my Beam, increase performance? 

    Unlikely. The Beam contains a later, even better wireless module than the Boost (which is why it doesn’t report ambient noise levels in the Network Matrix).

     

    And why wouldn’t having it in an otherwise empty room act as a “booster”?

    In your case a wireless Boost wouldn’t do anything useful. It would sit connected wirelessly to the wired Beam, but wouldn’t act as a relay for anything else. The reason is that SonosNet chooses the lowest ‘cost’ paths across the mesh, which translates into minimising the number of wireless hops. Since your 1-hop signal strengths are already quite sufficient nothing would opt for a 2-hop connection via the wireless Boost.

     

    I read here (https://freetime.mikeconnelly.com/archives/6050) that:

    Contrasting the BOOST device with a Sonos speaker running in BOOST mode, the BOOST device:

    • contains 3 wireless antennae for 360 degrees of coverage and significantly more range
    • has “enterprise grade wireless performance”, and
    • has “advanced wireless interference rejection”

    Is this not true?  Or is it just out of date?

    That article is 4 years old. It precedes the latest wireless tech, which if I recall debuted in the Beam/gen1.

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