Interested in class action against sonos?

No not every one, just ‘quite a few of the matters reported’ as I was so careful to mention.

For example, the Zombie Zones.  They don’t play, but they show up in the player as playing. They have an active IP address that I can see from the Desktop controller Help/About....  I can Ping them and they respond to the ping.  Just no sound.  I remove them from the group.  I re-add to the group - Voila!  Music now playing.

I get that some network problems can be esoteric, but this seems like something other than a network issue.  These are wired Ports.  No WIFI.  All the SONOS components have fixed IP addresses assigned by the router.  This problem started about 3 weeks ago after the last Firmware update.

My network jacks are wired to a Netgear 16-port Switch.  That switch is connected to a Netgear Orbi 960 Router which is connected to an XFI XB7 Gateway.  Max LAN speeds are 1000 because it’s a 1GB switch.  Max WAN Speed is 2000/240 because that’s where my XFI plans tops out.  Typical WIFI connections get 300-600/200 depending on the device and location.  There are many other WIFI IoT devices on the LAN including Apple TVs, Hue Lights, NEST Cams, Ecobee Thermostats, etc.  The only devices displaying obvious erratic behavior are the SONOS components.

Maybe the Zombie Zones are a network problem.  Iif they are, I have no idea where to start to solve it.  And no idea what led to it.  I have never, in the past 10 years plus, experienced the Zombie Zone issue until now.  Doesn’t mean it’s not the network, but the timing is suspicious.  It would be easy to verify if I could roll-back to a known working version of the system, but…

Happy to entertain any possible solutions.

More on topic, many of you would apparently be surprised at what sort of Class Action suits have merit.

In your posts @stevepow, you have mentioned the audio dropouts and I explained the App is not a player, but merely a remote - you could close the App and power off the controller device and it should not have any effect on the audio playing. So that alone (for me at least), infers an issue between the speaker and the audio source. You can rule out the App in that instance as it’s irrelevant to the problem. The fact you’re seeing zombie zones is likely only confirming the earlier mentioned network issue.

My personal first suggestion is quite a simple one - power off your Sonos devices and reboot the router and fully close the Sonos controller App, then when the internet is back online bring your Sonos products back online one at a time, letting each one connect and settle before moving onto the next device.

If any devices are wired back to the router then start with those first. Then add back the nearest and the next-nearest device etc; until all are back online and see if that resolves the zombie zone Issue and test to see if the audio started via the new Sonos app, then works for you.

Which is why we have all been careful not to say any such thing.

@sigh .  interesting you should mention mesh WiFi networks and SonosNet.  But if wiring more than one speaker causes network loops then that is (almost) unequivocally a router / networking issue, as it means the router (or maybe a switch0 is not STP-enabled.  Until Sonos finds a way of defying the laws of networking physics, there are going to be problems until the network configuration is corrected.

SonosNet seems doomed to me, which I write with a heavy heart.  Using SonosNet has often been a solution to some of the potential networking  issues we have discussed.  Newer Sonos speakers such as the ERA300 have no Ethernet port and cannot connect to SonosNet..  Sonos are giving up a useful tool and are more vulnerable to the infinite variety of peculiarities that router manufacturers seem to come up with, IMO.

Not so sure about the ‘we have all’ bit at all.  I’ve not jumped to any conclusions, unlike some. 

Consensus over the past page or so suggest that there are now enough other things at play to mean the logical process and troubleshooting of the fairly recent past can no longer be taken for granted.

These kinds of misleading and baseless statements help no-one - and only antagonise things even more.

It’s not a case of jumping to a conclusion. It’s often mentioned as a place to begin the trouble-shooting and if it’s not the local, or wider, area network, then other things can also be suggested, like disabling a VPN client on the controller, or switching off the ‘mobile data connection’ for the Sonos App, or reserving IP addresses etc. and contacting Sonos Support, just as a few examples.

The suggestions have to flow from somewhere and past experience shows that starting with a users network is as good as any place to begin the fault finding.

It’s certainly better than doing nothing and just claiming it’s the new Sonos App that is at fault, without considering the ‘usual’ troubleshooting things to begin with.

I’ve been monitoring this thread and I know some comments are in reference to what I have said. That’s fine as everyone has their own opinion and I stand by mine.

Hold on to your seats because I’m going to ruffle quite a few feathers with my next comment….

IMO the premise for this thread regarding a class action suit is sheer lunacy! Furthermore the number of people buying into it boggles the mind. Is Sonos that important to your life that you feel so betrayed?

In truth..Sonos did release the new app prematurely. However Sonos did supply a reason as to why which was to accommodate the release of the Ace and Swap feature with the Arc. I’d guess other products as well that are in the pipeline possibly planed for 2024. However…In the end the app was broken…so be it.

Lets’ talk about the reality of it all. I’m using the same app on my iPhone 15 ProMax and not experiencing the end-of-the-world problems being talked about in this thread. Everything that was supposedly broken in the app is working on my end. I don’t use Music Libraries so I can’t comment on that. 

Granted I’m not using my Sonos every minute of the day and every feature that was supposedly broken in the new release. If I were I’d probably be able to point to everything that was not working and raise a complaint. So I guess I’m lucky in that respect or either the Sonos gods have my system in a protective bubble. Not!

To close I’ll leave you with this question….

If I’m able to use my Sonos in every way that people in this thread are saying they can’t (excepting music libraries) then what might be the other reason/component causing so much user experience pain????

@Ken_Griffiths , you're completely missing my point. I'm not saying there's anything at all wrong with you trying to help and following your troubleshooting process.

Although you did feel there wasn't enough information to go on to decide otherwise, it seems most at least now feel one can't say ALL the bugs discussed here can be traced to network issues and most have been careful not to say so. The point being made is that to still insist they ALL are (not you!) doesn't help because we don't and can't know - in fact, in some cases we know there are bugs not related to local network.

I’m sorry to come off like a complete idiot that has no idea how SONOS works.  My bad. I have had SONOS for over a decade. I know what the controller software does. And I won’t give you a resume, but I know my way around computer networks.

I described a very specific issue where I know with certainty the device is on the network with a valid IP address.  It stops playing while other Ports, all wired, in the group continue to play.  All I have to do to get it to resume playing with the rest of the grouped speakers is remove it from the group and re-add it to the group using the app/controller. No network intervention required.

If the device was not connected to the network, I would neither be able to remove it from or add it back to the group and it would not show up in the controller at all.  Pull one your devices off the network and tell me if you see it in the Controller.  You will not, and you won’t be able to “ping” it either.  That’s why I call them zombies.  I see them in the Controller, I can ping them, I see them if I run an IP scan on my network. But suddenly no audio.  They are not on mute, and the line out volume is “fixed” (or so says the controller app - but where’d that setting go?  Oh, there it is! In the S2 app on my iPad that hasn’t been hi-jacked/updated. 😐🙄  I digress, this is not about the lame controller app - it’s about a Class Action suit that got also hi-jacked into all sorts of other rants including Zombie players...)

I'm not going to assume what technical expertise you may or may not have, but I’m not buying “network issue”.  And I have to believe you didn’t read what I said as I never implied this was a controller app issue, even though there are plenty of those too.

My hypothesis is that it is indeed NOT the CONTROLLER that keeps a group of SONOS components playing together in Sync.  You as much as said that too.  If you shut down the controller, obviously the music still continues to play from all players in sync.  Or it should and it always has for me until recently.

So, what is keeping those players in sync and playing together? If not the Controller software, then what?  You are correct that it is not the Controller app, but what do you think it is?  Where do you think the brains are?  How do you think a controller on your Desktop knows what the controller on your Phone told the Sonos devices to do?  Do you think the controllers talk to each other, or something else is going on. Spoiler: The controllers do not talk to each other.

What do you think will happen if you have a wired group playing in sync and you pull the network cable from one for a few seconds and then plug it back in?  Have you tried it? For that one device it is a fairly catastrophic network event - the network is gone.  Seems like it would be a possible way to force a network error bad enough to create a Zombie, right?

Well no.  What happens is:

1. it fails over to WIFI with brief interruption in the playback.
2. if WIFI is disabled for the Port and the network is unplugged long enough for playback to stop as the buffer runs out, the Port IP address can no longer be pinged, obviously, and the Port vanishes from the controller and the group.  No Zombie.  More interestingly, when plugged it back into the network after a minute or so, it automatically rejoins the group and begins playing again.

That’s how robust the group playback is when things are working normally even with substantial network interruptions.  So, what is causing the Zombies?  Why now after all these years? I have done quite a bit of troubleshooting beyond simply re-booting the entire network and repowering all 12 SONOS components.

It may well be a network problem. I don’t know. I know it’s not a simple network problem even though the network is relatively simple for these devices: they don’t use Wi-Fi, they don’t use the router once they get their assigned and reserved IP addresses, they don’t use the internet gateway, they simply communicate through the switch they are all plugged into. I could shut the network down, other than that switch, and they’d happily keep playing music from my local library.

I’ve run out of things to try.  I’ve done the simple things and beyond.  If / when support ever comes back up for air, I’ll run a diagnostic for them and maybe they’ll know what to do - if there’s anything to do - or can get the problem into the queue to be fixed.

What doesn’t help is people coming here and trying to gaslight others into thinking, no, the app is fine, it's you and your ridiculous clinging to some missing feature(s…...) that don’t matter to the enlightened and that you shouldn’t care about either.  Or no, the firmware is fine, it’s you and your network and your neighbor's network and Elon Musk’s satellites, the northern lights, northern exposure, silicon-covid, or whatever other random thing.