Answered

Playbar drops from network constantly - works ok with TV sound


My playbar will go in and out of connection with the network, staying connected only for about 30 seconds at a time.  Any suggestions given the below?

 

  1. It’s connected via WiFi - 5Ghz with a strong signal in its location
  2. If I restart it, it will always reconnect for a good 15-30 seconds and then drop out
  3. Device is about 7 years old and issue started 4 weeks ago
  4. Hasn’t remained connected for more than a a few minutes in weeks
  5. Works totally fine for playing TV sound, but won’t stay grouped with other speakers (as it is dropping off the network)
  6. Paired with a Sub
  7. There are 8 other sonos speakers in the network and none have this issue

 

Steps I’ve taken:

  1. plenty of restarts
  2. ensured cables are securely connected
  3. using a different power outlet
  4. I’ve successfully assigned a static IP from the router (device will connect only with the reserved IP I’ve assigned.
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Best answer by John B 29 October 2022, 18:32

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10 replies

I suggest as an experiment you connect one of your speakers to the router by Ethernet.  Give it a few minutes then check in About My System that all speakers have WM=0 next to them.  See how it goes then post back.

That's a good suggestion, but the network has been unstable when running on sonos net. While the speakers are spread out around the home, it is very unreliable for many speakers.  Meanwhile, there is a high quality mesh network in place for the normal wifi.

 

I'll try it just to see if this issue goes away for the playbar though.

Having a mesh WiFi with.Sonos not on SonosNet almost guarantees instability.

To which network device did you wire a Sonos device when you tried it?

Now that I know you have a mesh system it is likely that you should wire a Sonos device to the primary mesh puck, although it depends on other aspects of the setup

Thanks again John.  I did the suggested experiment and it didn't help.

 

It was a Sonos one speaker that was corded. It was wired to the primary router of the mesh network.

 

It's a tp link one mesh network in case that matters.

Is there another router involved? Eg an ISP router? When you wired a device you didn't 'Disable WiFi ' on it did you?

No other network change was made to the Sonos One speaker that was plugged in (meaning Disable Wifi was not disabled).

 

I did observe in Sonos → Settings → System → About system all speakers now have “WM: 0” indicating a SonosNet connection except a Move which has remained on the wifi network.

 

There is a modem/router provided by the ISP, its WiFi network is not in-use.  To this a higher-end TP-Link router was connected and serves as both the wired and wireless router for any device on the home network.

Interestingly this morning I’ve noticed the playbar stay connected for at least a few hours without dropping. This is still with the Sonos One speaker mentioned yesterday wired.  I’m trying not to get my hopes up but I’ll continue to monitor and report back in a day or two.  Hopefully the rest of the system remains stable which it did not the last time I tried this.

Fingers crossed.  You might be able to improve stability further by going to Settings, System, Network, Manage Networks and removing your WiFi credentials.

Edit: actually I if you do that ir will stop your Move working. I can't remember if you can add wifi details for the Move only.

Hi @John B , just wanted to close the loop and confirm turning on the SonosNet by wiring one of the speakers seems to have been the solution.  There haven’t been any instability issues in 10 days.

In this case, I did leave the WIFI settings on because the Move requires it (as you pointed out).