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My Beam has worked quite happily for over a year. Decided to add a Sub to the setup - and held off buying surrounds for now.  It’s taken me on/off a day to get the sub added and connected to the Beam.  Honestly, it’s an absolute dumpster fire of a setup process. I mean, I use lots of smart home gadgets, and this is definitely the worst setup process I’ve been thru.  I’ve setup different Wi-Fi networks, changed settings as per suggestions on here, sometime I see the Sub but no Beam, then I see the Beam and no Sub. Then I see both but it says they aren’t on the network, and then the sub needs an update - which it subsequently says failed, and then “no update required”.  Seriously folks, do you do any QA of the setup process at all?

It appears to be working, but I know as soon as I get a power outage or a network reboot, it’ll die and I’ve no desire to go thru this hot mess again.  Whoever is responsible for software development there really needs to try and experience the setup from a consumer perspective. In the same time it took to get the sub working, i managed to install 3 Alexas, and 10 Hue lights all connected to Wi-Fi no issue.  

The issue will almost certainly be with your network. (Note: Sonos has more onerous local networking needs than Alexa/Hue.)

Someone from Support could probably offer advice if you were to submit a system diagnostic and post the confirmation number.

You know, I thought too it’s probably networking…  but it worked through perseverance rather than tweaking a network setting.  I kept trying, and left it for significant periods of time and boom, literally, it started working…

 

awful setup experience.  I think I’ll leave expanding this until they get better at their software platforms. This is why it’s really likely they’ll get overtaken by Apple or Amazon eventually.  Really disappointing.

You had a bad experience. Every speaker I have added over the last 10 years has taken a minute or two and been trouble free. That includes a gen 3 Sub.

Whatever the reason for your bad experience, a sample of 1 is not a logical justification for your assumption that it is always that way.

Equally your anecdotal experiences hold as much water as mine. My point here is that when it goes wrong, there is little we can do - spinning circle animations can’t help us troubleshoot, perhaps some better on-screen messaging would be helpful. From the forums there are lots of issues about updates and poor in app messages, there are also suggestions of Sonos devices require specific network settings. FAQs are a good way to help - but the FAQs I’ve found are poor.
 

My experience, and you can’t deny what it was, was that the setup process is poor. Anyone walking into this needs to be prepared for having to pull your Wi-Fi apart, or spending a long time on with support, just to add a speaker.  It shouldn’t be this hard, even if it’s only occasionally.

Hi @ZombieBoy 

Welcome to the Sonos Community!

I agree with @ratty - it’s probably a networking issue. However, I do take your point about the lack of helpful messaging in the app during problems and will treat this as feedback/feature request. Thank you.

As @ratty also says, in all likelihood we would be able to identify this issue and help you resolve it if you get in touch with our technical support team. 

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