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I am an electrician who has a fairly nice sonos setup. I do run into problems in my living room (where most of my devices are located) with some audio lag when watching tv. I also have issues when connecting to multiple speakers on my iphone to play music in multiple rooms, and sometimes a speaker or speakers will just stop playing music while connected to multiple speakers. 

I was looking to try and fix this issue and was wondering if running Cat6 cables to each device would help solve them and also enhance my sonos experience (faster connection to devices, eleiminate the lost speaker issue while playing music in multiple rooms, and get rid of the lag I get when watching tv). 

My plan was (if I hear back that it’ll work and help) to run Cat6 to all of my devices throughout the house and plug them all into a network switch which would plug directly into my router. 

My current setup:

Living room

  • Arc (connected to TV with HDMI - I also have an optical cord I could use but didn’t know which was best)
  • 2 Fives on both sides of my TV (wireless connection)
  • 2 Ones on the back wall used for surround sound (wireless connection)
  • Sub behidn my couch (wireless connection)

Other rooms

  • a single Sonos One in my Master Bathroom, Master Bedroom, and Kitchen (wireless connection)

An situation to better explain the lag problem: If I’m watching TV I can use the Arc, Sub and 2 Ones fine (sometimes a little lag with audio-to-picture but nothing crazy) but if was to add the 2 Fives to the configuration, I would get a really bad lag - or if I wanted what’s playing on the TV to play on other speakers throughout the house I would get the same issue but a much worse delay in audio. It would be playing the same thing on all speakers that are connected but the Fives would be out of sync or the kitchen/other room’s speakers would have the same issue. 

I’m not worried about running the wires to each because I had to add outlets for most of them anyway when I got them so they were in the location that I wanted, and I have pull string in the outlets as well specifically so I could add Cat6 cable in the event that I ever needed to or wanted to. My main concern was if that would help with the issues/inconveniences that I have been having or if I needed to purchase any other sonos equipment to make everything sync better or not. Does the network switch have to be a certain kind or does any of the devices have to be connected directly to the router or would having them on the same switch (which would then plug into the router) work?

If anybody has had this issue and/or ever thought about doing this setup, and did it, or knows the best solution to fix any of my problems, I’d love to hear how it went and if it helped with your Sonos experience or not. 

cat6 cables will make zero difference with anything, much less audio lag. If you wish to hard-wire using Ethernet, save a ton of $$ and use cat5e cables.

If you Group speakers to a TV source you will get 75ms of lag to the grouped speakers. Nothing you can do about that. Only speakers Bound to an Arc (as surrounds/subs) will be lag-free.

The dropouts can be caused by wireless difficulties. I suggest that you wire as many players as is practical. 

I prefer CAT-6. In the overall scheme of things the raw wire cost compared to cAT-5 is not significant to me. Yes, CAT-6 is a bit more trouble to terminate, but your labor is free.

You can improve overall WiFi performance by moving up to a modern WiFi mesh system. Wire the mesh points because this is much more reliable than wireless mesh points.

You can tinker with synchronization between the TV and Grouped rooms by going to System -- -TV rooom] → TV Dialog Sync. While this might damage the video lip sync, you can improve the sync between the TV and Grouped speakers.

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Note that sound travel is pokey at about one foot per millisecond. Consider a situation where listener ‘A’ is near speaker ‘A’, listener ‘B’ is near speaker ‘B’, both speakers are wired to the same amplifier, and positioned 30 feet apart. Listener ‘A” will claim that speaker ‘B’ is delayed by 30ms and listener ‘B’ will claim that speaker ‘A’ is delayed by 30ms. Listener ‘C’, positioned midway between the speakers will not experience any delay. All observers are correct. This means that if you can hear a more distant room at your current position, it will be delayed.

ARC is not designed to support a pair of external L/R speakers, but you can minimize the speaker to ARC mismatch by adjusting the TV Dialog Sync.

I like having my Sonos wired to Ethernet versus using my home WiFi. I can use any settings I like on the WiFi then without having to keep it compatible with the Sonos requirements.

Only one main speaker or a Boost needs to be wired, then all main speakers (but Move and Roam) will use the SonosNet wireless connection rather than your home WiFi. I have several wired and the rest wireless here, just because I had Ethernet available and was happy to lessen the load on the wireless channel.

Surrounds and the Sub use a low latency 5 GHz signal to connect so there is no good reason to wire them.

Sonos only uses 100 speeds so no need for expensive cabling outside of high electrical noise environments.

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