Interested in class action against sonos?

Ken can answer for himself, (Edit: while I was typing he did so) but I’ll chip in too.  In eleven years of posting on this forum, I have seen hundreds of posts like this, describing dropout, missing zones, sound breaking up.  The poster is absolutely convinced that it cannot be local network issues, it must be faulty Sonos.  In at least 95% of cases it turns out to be local network issues.  Nearly always it can be corrected. 

Sonos does make heavy demands on a network - much heavier than most applications, so the network isn’t necessarily faulty.  Maybe Sonos is asking too much for some networks in their existing configuration. So maybe it is better to say that the solution generally involves doing something to the network, not Sonos, It doesn’t mean that the network is at fault.

FWIW, I really dislike the latest app, but as Ken said, it’s just a controller and can’t be responsible for the sorts of problems that @stevepow is experiencing.  System firmware updates could have created problems, but I doubt that they have been that significant.  Plus I have seen them blamed for countless problems over the years, and only on a very few occasions have they been at fault.  Maybe they are on this occasion - I can’t say for certain that they are not. 

Btw, talk of a class action is simply nonsensical.  If you are unfortunate enough to have your life savings disappear to a fraudulent investment scheme, or have your health wrecked by a drug for which the safety tests were faked, then start looking into class actions.  For this, there is not a 1 in a million chance of it even being brought, never mind succeeding.

I have seen this threatened on here on numerous occasions, including when the old app was the new app and disliked by many posters.  Although the dislike has been more intense, widespread and long lasting than at the previous change, and this time I share the dislike.

Yes, there are a variety of different issues being reported here and that’s exactly my question - do you feel they are ALL (a quote, not me capitalising) due to network issues that were already present and the older app more tolerant of - even though we know for a fact the new app and firmware have more network dependency.  I think you know there isn’t a cat in hell’s chance of there being legal recourse - otherwise we’d have had it.

After every update there’s always issues - usually resolved with reboots of every device etc.  The issues being experienced here are way above anything I can recall - and have gone on for far, far longer.

Sonos could be doing a massive amount more than they are - stickies, URLs added to the App when certain errors come up (SMB etc.), emails with updates to keep customers updated, ‘owning’ the issues etc. etc..

I know 3 people now who have bought new speakers in the last 3 weeks and all were Sonos users (2 - 5 speakers).  They would certainly have bought others at some point but they just saw their system broken and unable to either play music or edit their queues.  They had very little information or communication to go on and wouldn’t dream of going online to attempt troubleshooting - they liked the plug and play and just expected it.  One was really annoyed (and asked me about it - and I was unable to resolve the issues) and the other two were quite blasé and have just moved on and switched their speakers off.  I highly doubt any will be buying more Sonos speakers though.

We’re going to find out if it’s all too little too late I suppose.  Sonos’ next financials will make very interesting reading.

This could/should have been a great period for Sonos - new ‘from the ground up’ App, new ‘asked for for years’ headphones - I really struggle to imagine how they could have got both things so staggeringly wrong.

Oh dear, based on personal experience of having to integrate global systems with Salesforce they wouldn’t be near the top of my recommendations. I need to get round to having a proper look through what’s changed in where the old vs new app is talking to, more for my own curiosity than anything else.

A quick look shows my speakers and tablet app requests currently disappear into Akamai’s edge, who will be delivering to the Sonos servers in the cloud, rather than direct to the nearest cloud provider edge point.

The website, forum and online controller look to be using okta, so there is hope salesforce aren’t in the mix 😁

I’ve no idea what privacy controls are in Android these days, but I could see that some of Apple’s controls may hide/mask some information from the Sonos servers. It’s still for Sonos to ensure their system works properly on devices with built in privacy controls.

Companies I’ve worked at could have saved a lot of time and money in development and testing if every time someone had an issue, our other clients got out the large hammer with ‘network’ written on the handle as the first response. 😂

What do you mean by ‘heavy demands on a network’ ? I’ve seen this mentioned various times over the years in relation to Sonos, but don’t remember seeing it quantified in terms of what that means.

As far as I’m aware, the Sonos stack, similar to MusicCast which predated it by a couple of years and Openhome, is a custom extension built on top of the Upnp AV specification. Unlike network audio standards, such as Dante, AES67, AVB which have defined microsecond or millisecond latency for near realtime multichannel audio and can be demanding, on a network shared with other IP traffic, Sonos is designed for home networks and is(was?) based on underlying standards that don’t even require working dns.

Yes, if Sonos is being used with vlans, daisy chained managed switches, guest/segregated WiFi etc you need to understand how to configure them properly, especially for multicast, but that isn’t a heavy network demand. Not every network device will work, especially the lowest priced supplier of ISP equipment, but that isn’t Sonos specific or a heavy network demand.

As more devices are joined and independently stream music, more network bandwidth will be used, but unless Sonos is using Unicast to every device from the group master that should be very little demand on a network.

Clearly there is something I’m missing about how Sonos works and the minimal impact it has on my network, to repeatedly see people saying it has ‘heavy network demands’ over the years. Or maybe my interpretation of ‘heavy network demands’ is different to what is meant.

@sigh .  I must apologise for understanding very little of your post.  I concede the technical high ground to you.  My own choice of words, “heavy demands”, was not a good one.  I have seen countless posts on here along the lines of “there is nothing wrong with my network, all my other devices work”  But getting a Smart TV to stream from the internet is less of a challenge than getting multiple speakers to stay in touch and sync perfectly.  The single device might function despite IP address conflicts or 2 DHCP servers, But it may make Sonos’ task impossible.  Another example is if some devices connect to the 2.4GHz band and others to 5GHz.  Sonos will be fine if the router bridges the two bands, but some don’t.  Would that be a feature of the network or a fault?  It doesn’t really matter what one calls it.  Sonos requires a network to have particular features that single devices do not.

Thank you for the examples, it helps me understand what you were meaning.

I agree there can be unexpected or random behaviour due to networking equipment. Especially these days with those WiFi routers and access points that keep either the bands or in some cases each WiFi device isolated by default. Things like that aren’t even peculiar or specific to Sonos and give similar issues with other multi-room brands.

I had an old switch and while it had all the required features, it’s software was so badly implemented it didn’t matter if you plugged Sonos, Yamaha, Denon/Marantz, Linn, Bluesound etc or appropriately setup Linux systems into it, things would randomly eventually appear, disappear or just never appear. Nothing to do with any of the audio devices or servers, just garbage software on that particular network switch 🙄

Sonos has its peculiarities, especially with the Ethernet/Sonosnet mix if you network cable more than one speaker. That’s caught me out a couple of times over the years. Forget to disable WiFi and it works fine for ages, then one of the speakers triggers a network change and either causes merry hell with routing loops or randomly gets interruptions and disappearances.

For the most part Sonos has historically been no better or worse with it’s network requirements than alternatives that operate in a similar way.

I generally agree with this, however, I must admit that I cannot say “It’s your network” with the same confidence that I used to.  The change over of the app, and the numerous bugs and missing features, had the unintended consequence of clouding troubleshooting attempts.  When someone claims that they are experiencing a new bug that are not already acknowledged by Sonos, there’s a a good chance it’s a local network issue, but we do know that Sonos is pushing out changes faster than normal and entirely possible that this is a new issue that has yet to be acknowledged yet.

Again, I see this as an unintended consequence of putting out the app to quickly, followed by frequent patches to fix issues.  Confidence has eroded, perhaps just in me personally, to identify an issue as network related vs a new bug.  I imagine Sonos support has similar issues, even though they have better information to work with.  That’s all aside from the fact that many support issues are just people expressing their frustrations rather than looking for actual solutions.

What @John B mentions in one of his posts above has, for the most part, been my experience too over the years that I’ve hung around the Sonos community. Issues reported are quite often (not always) a local issue and this new App (for me at least) isn’t, in many respects, behaving any differently than the previous S2 App. All the Sonos players get their IP addresses, they all show, group/ungroup and play/pause the selected audio via the new App, same as the old App, but navigation is perhaps just a little slower in some areas. 

All my music services and local NAS-library work aswell… I think the new App and Sonos products would not work for anyone, if either software, or product firmware, were at fault, as they are virtually the same for everyone. The only varying factors I can see, are the connected networks and/or controller devices.

I don’t think any of us though should jump to conclusions, either way. I personally just want to see everyone have a working Sonos system, but it’s a difficult task when there are so many variables to consider, including a brand new App in the mix, which adds further complexity to any fault-finding.

In some cases users here, have been ‘steered’ by others to believe that the new App is the root-cause of their problems anyway - I’m not convinced that’s actually the truth for quite a few of the matters reported. It certainly seems ‘highly unlikely’ that the App is the cause in @stevepow’s case above and I’ve seen other ‘similar’ reports on the forum too where users think the new App is to blame for their woes.

Whatever the case anyway, it’s clear the new Sonos App is here to stay.

Exactly @melvimbe 

Indeed.

I couldn't imagine the knowledge and confidence required to believe and state every bug is a local network issue.