Sound cuts out of wired PlayBar

Note that only Forum moderators have the ability to see diagnostics. Sonos support folks don’t frequent these forums, so if @Ken_Griffiths suggestions don’t work, I’d suggest that you call Sonos Support directly to discuss it.

When you speak directly to the phone folks, they have tools at their disposal that will allow them to give you advice specific to your network and Sonos system.

You mention “paired” do you mean the other speakers in the Playbar’s room (sub and surrounds) or do you mean ones in other rooms grouped to the Playbar?

If it is the multiple rooms case, does the music drop when you start by creating the Group with the Playbar or only when you start creating the Group from another Room?

In the second case you are sending the music to the Room you started the Group with and then back to the Playbar, giving it 2 network trips. In the first the Playbar sends the music to the other Room(s) with just one wireless trip.

I don’t have Pandora but my Amazon music will glitch from time to time with just one Room stopping while other Rooms continue to play without issues. I’ve never seen it come back from that failure without intervention but a quick selection of a different Amazon stream gets the problem Room playing again and I can switch back.

A chat session with support sent me to call.  Called in and the first thing they wanted to do was change WiFi channels...which I refuse to do due to the amount of known interference on the other two channels.

Support did notice I use Ubiquiti and had me make two adjustments there.  So enabled “Multicast DNS” and “IGMP Snooping” at the global network layer.  We all know Ubiquiti has a checkered past regarding their firmware updates and introducing different problems in every “fix” they issue.  I have yet to correlate if any updates have happened that line up with my “issues” with the Sonos environment.

What drives me wonky is trying to understand how SonosNet impacts audio output of a wired speaker?  Support was unable or unwilling to explain this.  The Playbar is wired to Ethernet and audio input was via Optical.  I guess I could also unplug the Ethernet and see if behavior changes any.

I have the very same issue. The Playbar is wired and all other speakers I have are wireless. The Playbar is linked with a pair of rear surround speakers and is often grouped with a pair of speakers in our kitchen. When dropouts occur, they affect only the Playbar, the other speakers continue to play. This problem has been going on for a couple of months now. I’ve had the Playbar for years and never before had this problem. 

I also called support and sent them diagnostics. They instructed me to enable Wifi on the Playbar (didn’t help) and to play around with the SonosNet channel (also didn’t help). They gave me a ticket #, but there’s no way to follow up on the ticket and I’ve heard absolutely nothing from Sonos support since.

My guess is that there’s a bug in the Playbar firmware and being an old product it’s very unlikely they’ll do anything to track the bug down and fix it. If I only had a couple of Sonos speakers I probably would have discarded them by now, but I’m heavily invested in their “system”. I’m sure replacing the Playbar with one of their new products would fix the issue, but I’m not biting. Not happy.

The surround speakers and kitchen speakers are working fine via Wifi.

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.

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.

@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.

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.

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.

@RubberBand Man I think my problem is resolved.

I relieved the Playbar of the wired node responsibility (pulled the network cable) and switched the wired node to a Sonos Port I have nearby. The Port is the newest Sonos product in my system. The Playbar is now wireless, as are all the other speakers in the house, except now for the Port.

I believe the issue was that the aging Playbar wasn’t up to the task of acting as the wired node in my system, which has quite a few speakers in it now. I don’t know for certain that’s the reason, but I do know that the configuration change appears to have resolved the issue.

So far everything has worked for a full day without drop-outs. The system in its original configuration had never gone that long without drop-outs. A few more days of testing should confirm the “fix”.

Back home for a few days and with limited use, we have not noticed any hiccups on the Playbar.  The only changes made were the two network tweaks to the UniFi setup.  I did not make any SonosNet changes of any sort.  I will continue to update this post if anything changes as we use it more often.  Not all of my Sonos gear has been powered back on since we got back yet.  I know at least four speakers are still powered off (garage, patio, etc...its too cold outside to care about those) and my Roam hasn’t been touched yet.  But the Playbar, one of the Beams, a sub, and a couple of the Play:1 are all online and functional.