SiriusXM Continues to Drop Out
Just to reiterate that there is still an issue streaming SiriusXM without encountering drop outs. Some times it takes a few hours, sometimes it is less. The issue ONLY occurs with SiriusXM. The issue is not related to anything in our Sonos ecosystem or network. This has been confirmed.
We have been in talks with Sonos dealer technical support (we are Sonos dealers and custom integrators) for almost a year, throughout which we have gone deep into diagnostics, made significant changes to our Sonos ecosystem and network, but the issue persists.
The only solution is stopping the stream, waiting for ~ 30 seconds, then starting it back up. The issue is resolved temporarily than comes back.
Sonos ultimately threw up their hands and deemed the issue on SiriusXM’s side stating that the encoding method of the SiriusXM stream is incompatible/too high of a bitrate for the Sonos ecosystem to be able to keep up with. We looked at multiple streaming service encoding formats via diagnostics and Sirius’s format stood out amongst the rest. Explains why we do not encounter the issue at all with other streaming services, and why the issue happens quickly when multiple zones are grouped from a SiriusXM stream.
This is an issue that is currently unresolvable. Not sure if Sonos is in talks with SiriusXM to fix or not. We are done being the guinea pigs for it, have put in hours of effort to try and resolve this, made hefty hardware changes to our network, however the effort has been fruitless.