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I have a Sonos Beam (Gen 1) and two Sonos One SLs.

I recently hooked up a new WiFi router and have a new network name so I began the task of migrating my Sonos system to the new WiFi. Which I’ve always found to be easier to just factory reset everything and start from scratch because the migration tools are tedious and flat out fail most of the time.

Now I cannot get my Beam and One’s to pair for surround. All three devices show up in my System.

I set them all to “Living Room” and for starters they all get their own living room. So I have Living Room, Living Room 2, and Living Room 3.

Which is weird but whatever. The system prompts me to setup surrounds. When I do so this operation always fails. The failure error is generic and says something along the lines of setup failed make sure all devices are powered on and try again.

What I’ve tried so far is…

  • Factory reset all speakers, forget my current system, add my Beam, add my One’s, attempt to setup surrounds. This left me with a Living Room with a Beam in it, no other devices, and the ability to remove surrounds, but doing so would error out. Playing audio to the room wouldn’t result in any output to either of the One’s.
  • Factory reset all speakers, forget my current system, clear the app data, clear the app cache, force stop the process. I opened the app again, added my Beam as a new device, added the One’s as new devices. Again I have the multiple living rooms problem. It attempts to setup surrounds. The setup fails, now I have a Living Room (+?+?) with a Beam, a Living Room with a One SL, and Living Room 3, also with a One SL. I cannot play anything to any device or room other than the Beam in one of the two identically named Living Rooms.

I’ve repeated a few different machinations of this process where I also power cycled my WiFi router before plugging the speakers in. The results were largely the same minus some different funkiness in how it named rooms. Sometimes it’d detect the right surround, but not the left, or vice versa. Regardless the result was always the same. An error configuring surrounds, no audio the the One SLs, and a wonky list of duplicate rooms with devices spread across them.

Some additional info…

  • I’ve configured my phone (Pixel 5a 5G) to connect to my 2G WiFi band (normally I’m connected to the 5G) since this is what the speakers support and are connected to. I wanted to minimize potential for errors in the hand off of the speakers connecting to one WiFi SSID and band while the app and other network information with Sonos was exchanged by the phone on a different band.
  • Sonos was previously connected to my Google Home app for voice control. I removed my old Sonos configuration from my Home app, and then unlinked my Sonos account from my Google Home account to eliminate any error potential there regarding routines the old Sonos system was attached to.

Though this may not contribute to solving the bigger of your problems, the “multiple living rooms problem” is not a problem, but the way Sonos works. All speakers when first set up form a “room” in Sonos. A “room” in Sonos is a defined speaker or (stereo or surround) set of speakers. All speakers have to be set up in their own “room” and only after that can surrounds can be added to the Beam “room”. Then their own “rooms” disappear. So you cannot put all speakers in one “room” (to form a surround set) if you do not have given them their own “room“ first. Sonos prevents giving new rooms already existing names, so it numbers rooms with the same name.

Confusingly this way to set up rooms differs from other manufactures like Google, whose “rooms” are more like physical rooms in which you can pack all kinds of devices, even including Sonos speakers that can not form a “room” in Sonos.

That does make a certain amount of sense.

It looks wonky but the underlying principle is sound enough.

What I find troubling is how the rooms are left over after the attempted creation of surrounds and there can be duplicate rooms under the same name.

So clearly the system is doing some sort of cleanup improperly when it comes to the automatic surround configuration.

I'm honestly disappointed by how bad the Sonos software is when it comes to configuration and error reporting. You're left guessing way too much.

Hi @BelugaAudio 

Welcome to the Sonos Community!

It’s possible that your new router isn’t happy about Proxied DHCP - I recommend you get in touch with our technical support team, who have tools at their disposal that will allow them to give you advice specific to your Sonos system and what it reports.

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