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Hi!

I have the following situation.

I am in a house with Eero Pro mesh network (total of 4 units, so good coverage).

My Arc and Sub are connected to Wifi and have been working with a surround setup well in the past.

The house came with built in-wall speakers that I would like to connect as surround speakers to the set up.  The TV/speakers are on the 2nd floor, but the cables of the built-in wall speakers go all the way to the basement.

The Amp worked without a problem independently.  Hower, when I tried to add the Amp as surrounds to the setup, I got the error message “There was a problem adding your surrounds. Check the network connection and make sure your products are powered on”. 

I have the suspicion that the issue is as follows:  The Arc wants to connect via a direct Wifi connection to the Amp, but the Amp is too far away and therefore out of reach to create the connection.

Would it help if I tried to run my Sonos setup on SonosNet instead of Wifi (I have 8 devices, so should get ample coverage) or would that not a difference (ie would the Arc still try to create a direct Wifi connection to the Amp)?  Note that I could connect at least 4 of the devices via Ethernet to my router (including the Amp), but I don’t have Ethernet near to my Arc nor my Sub.

Thanks for your help!

Michael

The Arc will still need to communicate directly with the Amp wirelessly, but it wouldn’t hurt to try it with your speakers on SonosNet to see if it makes a difference. If you can find a way to terminate the speaker wire so the Amp can be stored on the 2nd floor with the Arc, this would be the best option.

Thanks. I will give it a try with SonosNet, but I am not that optimistic. The connection between my Arc and my Sub shows as “WM: 2” (while SonosNet shows as “WM: 0” and wifi as “WM: 1”). So the surround setup seems separate from SonosNet. 
 

The previous owner of my house installed the built-in wall speakers, so not sure where the cables are running. 

 

Maybe I return the amp and get 2 Sonos Ones as surround speakers. Would be cheaper than the Amp, but aesthetically less pleasing (and a waste of an unused pair of built-in wall speakers…). 

You have analysed the situation correctly. My one pedantic quibble would be that the direct communication between the Arc and Amp is wireless but not WiFi - your WiFi isn't involved.

WM=2 just means "bonded as surround in a system that is in WiFi mode". If you were to put your system into SonosNet mode this would change to WM=0, but would not change the nature of the connection between Arc and Amp.

Thanks for the confirmation!! Very clear and helpful. 

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