ARC disconnects from SUB and Surrounds when TV is turned on

The surrounds and sub are bonded to the Arc and they work fine if I power cycle all the Sonos components after the TV is turned on.  But they disconnect when the TV is turned on.  I did determine that the Sonos ARC does not disconnect from the Sub and Surrounds if the eARC is unplugged when the TV is turned on, but when I plug it in it disconnects (this indicates a firmware bug and not RF interference).  I did send a diag. to Sonos when the system was broke 1649291719 and when it is working 5777962.  I hope someone at Sonos is reading this because the chat bot is of no help and I’ve received no email responses.  I’ve been working on this for two weeks now.  I’m using the iPhone app to monitor the Sonos components.

I know other visitors to the forum here have both the LG CX and Sonos Arc, but not seen them mention a case where the bonded surrounds dropout when the TV is powered on - it’s like something is ‘strangely’ affecting the 5Ghz ad-hoc connection between the surrounds and main HT player, particularly as the Arc stays connected and working with the TV🤔?

It maybe best/easier to simply give the Sonos Support Staff a call instead. I suspect they may want to run some tests with your setup anyway to see if there are any hardware/software issues.

I was talking with them, hope they can figure it out.  I noticed in the ARC support/status page that the ARC phy is getting 10’s of thousands of errors.  So maybe it’s a H/W problem.  Here’s the status report:

contents of /proc/ath_rincon/statusDebug info for INFRA mode at 17191263Mode: INFRA (sonosnet)Operating on channel 2412Home channel is 2412HT Channel is 5805RF Chains: RX:4 TX:4RF Chainmask: RX:0x0F TX:0x0FMax Spatial Streams: RX:4 TX:4Noise Floor:    0 dBm (chain 0 ctl)Noise Floor:    0 dBm (chain 1 ctl)Noise Floor:    0 dBm (chain 2 ctl)Noise Floor:    0 dBm (chain 3 ctl)PHY errors since last reading/reset: 5214378     Region: 1Node 5C:AA:FD:CC:EB:7B - FROM 00  00 : TO 00 : STP 00 : MODEL 28.1: KEY -1  00  00Node 54:2A:1B:18:79:25 - FROM 00  00 : TO 00 : STP 00 : MODEL 32.1: KEY -1  00  00Node 5C:AA:FD:CC:EA:C7 - FROM 00  00 : TO 00 : STP 00 : MODEL 28.1: KEY -1  00  00

Looks like the format got trashed when it got sent, here’s the importent line “

PHY errors since last reading/reset: 5214378  “

Don’t know if those are internal or external but there sure is a lot of errors for a device that was just powered up.

The sonos support had me change the network channel to 1. I already tried 6 and 11. The TV needs to be off for a least an hour before turning it on to have the problem.  So now I just need to wait and try it out.

That PHY Error report is not always very useful because the error report is reset after a reboot or page refresh. If you want to keep a log, say for different times of day or time since the TV was reset, pick a constant time interval between page refreshes. The data will not likely be 100% consistent because for high counts, a fraction of a second difference between your responses could result in a difference of hundreds of errors.

Certainly, if the report drops from hundreds of thousands to hundreds, there is a hint somewhere.

How are the PING times to the devices? Are you seeing dropped packets?

I reset everything, set it up on the floor with a BD player for audio source and an old Linksys router for the wired connection to the ARC.  It’s more than 12’ from any interference and all sonos componets are within a foot. Set everything back up and as soon I started an audio stream the ARC disconnected from the Sub and Surrounds and now it will not reconnect.  This problem has nothing to due with the TV or interference.  It’s either a firmware bug or hardware bug in the Sonos componets.  I’m going to hammer on sonos to get this fixed. 

Sonos has been no help so far, I got dropped from the phone twice and dropped from the chat twice.

I had Sonos support working on it for about a hour Friday night, the problem didn’t get fixed and it was getting late so I went to bed.  Saturday the system was working and I could not break it, it broke every time I started and audio stream for the last month and now it works!  I don’t know what got changed but if it keep working I’ll setup my theater again and keep my fingers crossed.  I still have an open ticket with Sonos support so if it stats to fail again I don’t have to start from scratch with there support people.