Sound cuts out of wired PlayBar

Why were you instructed by the Support Staff to enable the Soundbar WiFi adapter then, it must have been enabled for your surrounds to work over a wireless connection? It doesn’t make sense to me. 🤔 

The surrounds had their Wifi enabled. It was just the Playbar that didn’t because it was wired. Enabling Wifi on the Playbar had no effect.

Do you have TV Autoplay enabled on the Playbar?

As a test I have disconnected the optical link from the TV and disabled Autoplay. My wife swears she heard one cutout, but overall, the cutouts are far fewer than they were before. Give it a try and let me know what effect it has for you. Thanks.

Your wireless surrounds though would not connect to your PlayBar if its WiFi adapter had originally been disabled, simply because the connection between any Sonos HT device and it’s surrounds is a direct "ad-hoc” 5Ghz wireless connection. The connection would not use your router WiFi signal.

Your surrounds likely would not work well, or ’likely’ not at all, if you wired the Playbar and then ‘mistakenly’ switched off its adapters, which it needs to talk to both surrounds (and any Sub(s) too). 

That’s why your initial post is not making sense to me. I’m surprised the HT setup surrounds worked at all if you had the WiFi adapter disabled and if all was being routed over your router, in-part using a wired and wireless link, then I’m thinking that’s why you were getting the audio partially dropping out on some speakers.

My understanding is that the Playbar uses SonosNet to communicate with the other speakers and not Wifi. Everything definitely works with Playbar Wifi disabled. I saw no difference when I enabled it.

@jmattioni 
Nope, that’s a different topic to the one we’re discussing here …SonosNet is an ‘exclusive’ (hidden) wired and wireless ‘mesh-based’ network for Sonos-only products. It uses STP (Spanning Tree Protocol), so that’s more about the Sonos network connection and the link between your Sonos rooms and the wired LAN.

The HT surrounds and Sub ‘slaves’ are directly ‘bonded’ to the Sonos ‘master’ Home Theatre device. As an example Era 100/300 surround speakers do not use SonosNet at all.

The expectation is that their link is a fast Ad-hoc 5Ghz wireless ‘direct’ connection otherwise, the players (Playbar/Surrounds/Sub, for example) should ALL be cabled back to the router, or to the same switch etc. it’s what helps them all to play TV audio in a timely manner and in lip-sync with the video on screen and it explains why ‘grouped’ (not bonded) Sonos rooms have a 75ms (minimum) audio buffer delay.

In fact if your PlayBar (with its WiFi adapter enabled only) is presently acting as the system ‘root-bridge’ for your Sonos network, then all your Sonos traffic is being routed through that master device too and that’s perhaps a secondary reason why you maybe experiencing audio dropouts. It sounds like you may have switched from one problem setup to another, rather than looking at ways to maybe solve your audio dropout issue.

@RubberBand Man Did you ever find a solution to the Playbar cutting out?

I have now completely isolated the Playbar, no surrounds, no grouping, and it is still cutting in and out. Tested with both a streaming service and with a local media server. 

Note that STP is NOT a Sonos protocol.  That is related to standard Ethernet networking and has nothing to do with audio nor data delivery.

You also mention you should have all of the devices cabled to the router??  From everything I have read over the years, absolutely not.  That will cause all kinds of havoc on your home network and spanning tree will have an absolute fit because of network loops.

Unless things have changed in the past year or so, you can only have a single root-bridge in your Sonos setup which is why only one device is supposed to be Ethernet connected.

We had about 1 day of testing before we left town for the holidays.  In that limited time, it didn’t seem to be acting up.  Not sure if that was because the reboot or because of the changes made to the UniFi networking.  Will test more once we return home in a couple of days.

Another fun fact….my in-laws have the same UniFi setup with Sonos and do not have this issue.  Of course there are some pretty major differences in our Sonos setups…mostly that they are still on S1 while we are on S2, and their root bridge is a Play:5 while ours is a Playbar.

I never said it was - I said Sonos use this protocol over SonosNet.

No I didn’t say this either. Only one Sonos product needs to be wired, but I would go one step further as Sonos supports up-to 32 products per HH and suggest wiring one product per 6 room cluster, but always wire back to the router, or an adjacent switch.

Yes, only one root bridge. I think we all know that - all I can say is you must be misreading my posts here.