I don’t have as many devices as you but have a mix of Gen1 and Gen2 Ones, an old Playbase, Era 300’s, Sub Gen1 and Sub Mini, and mine all play nicely. 
 

Locking my wifi to a specific channel and setting ip addresses for my speakers helped overcome my reliability issues some years back, and since doing that have very rarely had any issues. 

Aside from Sonos portables and components i have a fair selection from Play 1s, 3s and 5s to both Eras  gen 1 Beams, Arc and Ultra.

You are going to hate hearing this...

And once I sorted out my networking issues (mutual interference, non-Sonos device interference, wifi settings incompatibilities and the hoary old IP Address assignment bug) my 20 Sonos device system is working great.

Thank you ​@nik9669a and ​@Stanley_4 .  I really appreciate your comments.

I too have done my fair share of network tinkering over the years.  My players all have assigned IP addresses and I’ve done my best to create the most Sonos-friendly electro-magnetic environment I can in my home.

However I’ve reached the limits of my technical capability and every new device I bring into my home seems to immediately want to connect to the internet to download an update (including, I kid you not, my clothes dryer and my fridge).  Could there be network interference getting in the way of me having the Sonos experience I used to have?  Absolutely.  Do I know how to fix it?  I do not.

Maybe it’s not my Sonos devices that have become incompatible, maybe it’s me!  I’m no longer Sonos compatible!

I guess that leaves me asking for a different thing from Sonos then:

Either come clean and sell your products with a big fat health warning that says that unless you are prepared to learn how to create a Sonos-friendly network then they may not work 

OR

Give me the tools, ideally built into your products, to clean my house to the point where your products will work.

Sound reasonable?  Or am I just blaming a hi-fi manufacturer for not wanting to learn to properly operate the technology I chose to bring into my home?

I am in the same boat with a ​@nik9669a and ​@Stanley_4. I have a mixture of old and new speakers in my system and have not had any connection issues since assigning static IPs and configuring my UniFi network to work with Sonos since I have wired speakers: Play1, Connect S15, Arc Amp and Five. I also have a Play5 Gen 2 that is wireless.
The big app update last year only bothered me because of removed functionality. 

There are many users willing to help here who may have similar networks as you do. You just need to ask.
 

I don’t have all the links readily available, but Sonos have in the past acknowledged the performance of older speakers.

For instance, here’s a quote from Tom Conrad’s interview with The Verge in May 2025.

There’s a category of issues that are particularly tied to the Play:1 and Play:3, which are 13- and 11-year-old architectures at this point. It’s sort of amazing to think that the iPhone in market when the Play:3 launched was the iPhone 4. Its halo feature was it had a selfie cam for the first time. So a lot has changed in tech since we shipped the Play:3, but fully a third of our households still have players from that generation that they love and they want to work, and we’re doing the hard work today of making sure that they have a great experience. This release that’s launching right now dramatically improves on the experience that they’ll have. In fact, quantitatively the experience is better than it was on those devices four years ago. So, far before the app itself. But we’ve got a bead on another set of enhancements that’s gonna take us even further over the spring and summer.

The monthly Office Hours on Reddit is another area where Sonos has publicly provided similar commentary on older speakers.

There was also a software update this month that specifically addressed the following:

• Improved responsiveness during playback for Play:1 and Play:3.

The oldest speaker I have in my current setup is a One (Gen1) stechnically I have Subs from 2014 and 2015 but I’m excluding them] and I haven’t really experienced any major issue with the app in relation to volume responsive, grouping, player discovery etc. My gripes on the new app are more around UI/UE.

I do have 6 older Play:1s and 3 Play:3s that I occasionally connect to the system just to update their firmware, which hasn’t given me any hassle and briefly playing to said speakers has worked successfully, but I haven’t used them for a prolonged period of time to determine if issues would surface from having them in the system permanently.

There are certainly things within your control that you can do to try and make sure your system as stable and reliable as possible, whilst Sonos continue to improve the performance of older speakers in the new app.

If you contacted Sonos Support they would be able to confirm if there was anything obvious relating to your network setup that was impacting on your Sonos system.

Once I exhausted my troubleshooting skills I waited for an issue to pop up, submitted a diagnostic and called Sonos support.

For me an actual call is far the best option.

If I was in your position, I would unplug your oldest players, Play:1 & Play:3’s, then test your system without them for a few days, that would prove if its the older players affecting performance/reliability of your system. You could then add them back in to the system gradually and monitor.

Also if grouping, always start from the newest player, and add older players, don’t start on an old player and add the new player(s).

I made a decision to replace my older speakers with new Era speakers beginning of year. Most have been sold on eBay for 50% of the cost price 10+ years ago. Good feedback received from buyers, so they must be working in the buyers environments OK.

For me, my newer speakers cause more problems than my older ones. I find this strange.

I do think though that if Sonos are going to keep recommending reserving IP addresses they should implement the ability to configure a static IP address for each device. This would make so much more sense IMHO.

Internally assigned static IP Addresses are often a nightmare for embedded devices. Trying to recover from a lost, wrong or outdated by LAN changes one is never pretty. Not so bad on systems you can log onto a console and fix the problem IP, but with no console, ouch.

The DHCP assigned Addresses do not have that problem as updates are made to the server on your router.

Not Sonos related but I still recall a bit of gear where you had dip switches to set the IP address, not only was that a massive pain but one co mon failure was the switches.

Sonos has never explicitly recommended reserving IP addresses.  That recommendation comes from users. 

Many modern routers use dnsmasq for DHCP, and this uses a hash of the MAC address to allocate IP address. If you see what appear to be random IP addresses in your DHCP table (as apposed to sequential) the router is probably using dnsmasq. It means the device will get the same IP address anyway, no need to reserve. Also, more of the local traffic is moving to IPv6 (eg AirPlay) so IPv4 reservation is slowly becoming irrelevant.

A few weeks ago, I pressed pause on an Apple Music stream with grouped speakers, replaced the entire network (Access Points and new router) with  same SSID but totally different DHCP network address (was 10.x.x.x, moved to 192.168.x.x), checked all Sonos speakers had reconnected to new access points and had new/different IP address on new network, when I pressed play on controller, the music continued where it was paused to the group that was originally playing on an entirely different network.

If you try to reserve Sub or surrounds in HT setup, your router may decide its an ARP Spoof, and block traffic.

My experience: you do not need static/reserved IP addresses, will possibly cause more problems.

I think that puts thing in a grey area then because I have seen user posts recommending reserved IP addressed “liked” by Sonos employed moderators.

It’s definitely a grey area (and why I said “explicitly”).  But there’s never been an official (or even unofficial) recommendation in a Sonos post, support column, or FAQ.  My own feeling is they are told not to mention it because it makes Sonos seem more difficult to maintain for networking neophytes. 

My system is pretty modern but even so there are still Sonos issues at power cycles and update reboots without the reserved IPs. Even when all Sonos end up with the pre-reboot addresses.

Not every system needs the reserved IP option, most seem fine without it, but many folks here have made that single change and found their system much more stable.

I'd like to hear more on Sonos and IP v6, anything you can share would be appreciated. Thanks.

The majority of my Sonos devices have reserved/static IP addresses to help with stability. Even if they don’t need them, I find I don’t have any issues with my system.

Interestingly perhaps, because the router lists the IP addresses for my home theatre speakers (Arc, 2 x Symfonisk, and Sub) in linear - i.e. in one long line - with the Arc’s MAC address applicable to all of them because they’re bonded to the Arc, I don’t assign any static IP addresses to them for fear of breaking what’s not broken… They seem to cope nicely without me messing it up!

Thanks everyone.  The erudition and generosity of this community is always a joy to behold.

I guess the development of this discussion highlights my disappointment with my current experience.

My first player was a ZP80.  I’ve been here from the launch of Sonos in the UK and now I just wonder if the evolution of home wi-fi, the proliferation of other devices pumping out their own stuff, and the proliferation of Sonos’ own hardware and software developments hasn’t resulted in an ecosystem which is just too complicated to predict.  (And, yes, I’ve spent hours on the phone to Sonos support over the years which has resulted in wired/wireless setups, wi-fi AP upgrades, replacing “problem” players and more).

Sonos don’t currently offer many prescriptions on the environment in which their products are deployed.  I guess that, for me, my interpretation is that how Sonos performs is now not predictable (some installations WILL require IP reservation, others won’t).  I don’t think it should fall to the community to either tell me that, or, find a way to help me with it.

​@IanJShaw I am definitely no longer a Sonos fan but I do think they will get it right again after, what I hope is just, the new app detour. 14 months ago my system “just worked” then the next day it did not. Nothing changed, no new devices or IP based equipment was added, my network usage stayed the same, the only change was the Sonos Controller and Firmware.

I know that Sonos can work in my environment, because it used to, but not in it’s current Controller and Firmware incarnation. Call me naive but I think it will be OK with the light at the end of the tunnel being the emerging plans to deprecate, and remove, the old communication protocols and focus on the new. This will free up memory in the speakers for the firmware developers but will also mean the end of the Desktop controllers (if I have read and understood the communications so far correctly).

If they were communicating transparently I think they would say they expected to be at this point 3 to 6 months after the new release. But clear and transparent communications have not been a feature of their approach since May last year.

Will this restore Sonos’ reputation possibly not but the important thing is that they know what good looks like and they know, better than any of us, how far short they have fallen. I think they will make it and currently plan to stick around until I need an upgrade but if things are not fixed by then I’ll be exploring the alternatives. 

I’m less optimistic. I’ve been telling myself the next update will fix things since the event. I needed to be patient, Sonos has worked great for me for 14 years, they’ll figure it out. Like you nothing changed on my network but the Sonos firmware/software.  After all these months my patience and good will towards Sonos is gone. if this disaster was fixable they would have done so already. I’m pissed they ruined a good thing. 

I did some traces a while back, not sure if I still have them. From memory, I recall the bonjour service discovery was IPv4 and IPv6. All Sonos devices had a link local IPv6 address, and when I streamed via AirPlay from iPhone it was using the IPv6 link local address of the Sonos speaker.

Streaming from Apple Music service was IPv4, via my ISP.

Thanks, I'm IP v4 only here, Quantum Fiber doesn't offer IP v6 except through the Rapid-Deployment hack and their v4-v6 gateway is slow and unreliable.

At some point I'll have a reason to setup a v6 tunnel, likely using Hurricane Electrics free level of service.

You will have IPv6 on your LAN, even if you don’t have a IPv6 address provided by your ISP. I’m also IPv4 on WAN. Check your local devices, you will see the IPv6 link local address.

This FAQ thread has been updated to include reservation of IP addresses.

Read the 3rd comment from 4 years ago in that thread. I agree reserving IP address may have had some benefits back in the day, and possibly for diagnosing with Sonos diagnostics after restarts of router and/or speakers to identify other issues.. Reserving IP addresses will not fix other underlying network issues, but it may help identify them.

I’ve read the thread. Doesn’t change the fact the FAQ was edited to include the mention of reserving IP addresses.

Yes, you are correct, which suggests the FAQ may need a peer review. There is no harm in reserving IP addresses on a DHCP server, but it should not be the default recommendation. I’m wondering where this originally came from, I have questioned it before.