Hi All,
My system: Beam (gen 1), and 2x Symfonisk bookshelves as surrounds.
TL;DR: You might be able to use SonosNet to connect your Surrounds back to your system, if nothing else is working.
I’ve been having a heap of issues connecting my Symfonisk bookshelves back into my living room system after a change of wireless router. It’s honestly caused me a lot of stress, and cost me a lot of time… so I want to post this to maybe save at least one person the same pain.
I went through the recommended factory reset route on every speaker in my system (multiple times), but the Symfonisks would always disappear from the system as soon as the Sonos app had completed its work. Sometimes I got a message like “Your speaker has been added, but may not appear in the System tabr...]”, but power-cycling the speakers didn’t work. If on the rare occasion they did not disappear at this point, they would appear as ‘unregistered’, and then disappear as soon as the app tried to register and update them. I tried removing the app, creating a new account, transferring the system, creating a new system. Nothing worked.
I also worked through this a couple of times with the help of Sonos support, but to no avail. Trying various solutions posted here also didn’t work for me.
The issue seems to have related to the fact that my Vodafone Ultra hub router is a multi-band type, and specifically that the Symfonisk always connects to the 5GHz network, whereas the Beam connects to 2.4GHz. They are unable to communicate with each other in this scenario, possibly due to my router, which does not allow me to do anything to control which networks are being used by which devices, allow connections between bands, or even to switch off certain frequency bands to ‘force’ a connection. Essentially, Sonos support said there is no workaround for this, given my router’s limitations.
However, I realised that I can use SonosNet to connect the Symfonisks back into the system. This is how I did it:
- Go into the Sonos app, and remove the (wireless) network in the ‘networks’ section (press the ‘-’ next to the network name).
- Connect the Beam to the router via an ethernet cable (check the beam is still working).
- There is no need to hard-wire the Symfonisks!
- Do a factory reset on the Symfonisks (one at a time is easier).
- Go through the registration and update process on each speaker.
- Everything should work from there on.
Note: In this configuration, the Beam does need to be hardwired whenever you want to use the surrounds. If you don’t want it always hardwired, then the unwired Beam will still work with the TV. This is ok for me, as I only use the surrounds for movie night. It’s a little annoying that I now can’t use the surrounds for anything else, though. I also can’t stream audio to the Beam in the unwired state, as it is disconnected from the network.