Trying to set up 8 Sonos One SL speakers for our Shop

  • 15 December 2020
  • 5 replies
  • 131 views

Hello all!

I am very new here. My boss tasked me with replacing our old wired speaker system from our old building to a new audio system when we moved into our new building.

Sonos seemed like the only choice to have speaker that had the power, utilized wifi, and could all be controlled from one device.

Here I am, sitting on $1k of speakers cluttering my desk and my boss is wondering why it is taking so long lol.

So, I have tried setting them up through the app and I get to the part where I am supposed to connect the speaker to the wifi. The app says that the product was added, but I might have to re-open the app or unplug/plug in the speaker to see it in my “System”. I have tried this many times and the “System” option remains light grey with no products appearing for use on the app.

I think there might be an issue with the speakers not actually connecting to the wifi but it says that it does. Unfortunately, I work in the office with 15 other people, so I can’t go around resetting the router every time it suggests, and it didn’t seem to make a difference when I did.

Really open to suggestions, but the app seems to be the issue. It also has given me messages that it can’t detect the wifi, but it has remained on and steady throughout the whole set up.

Is Sonos maybe the wrong product for this application? Any input is welcome.

 Sincerely - Just f=Frustrated John

 


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5 replies

Userlevel 6
Badge +11

Have you checked the router to see if they are getting an IP? 

You may have looked at this already, but assuming your building isn’t huge and you can easily wire one of the Sonos devices to the network, you can run the System on Sonosnet which has some serious stability benefits on most cases 

https://support.sonos.com/s/article/3209?language=en_US 

The office WiFi may employ wireless client isolation. It’s common on ‘guest’ networks. Alternatively subnet broadcast/multicast may be blocked. Sonos can’t work in WiFi mode on such networks.

As Bumper suggests, wiring one of the speakers (or a Sonos Boost) and running in SonosNet mode could be the best option.

That said, some offices put their wired and wireless networks onto different IP subnets. In that case Sonos won’t work with mobile controllers, though it could work with the desktop controllers (PC, Mac) on wired machines if it can somehow be set up first. The desktop controllers can’t do system setup. You’d probably have to set up the system elsewhere then bring it to the office and plug it in.

I am currently working with our tech guy, and we got one connected. We are now trying to chain the rest of them together. Apparently our guest wifi was the one it kept trying to connect to, which has more restrictions on what it will allow.

 

Will update soon.

Userlevel 7
Badge +18

It may be worth setting up another guest network for the speakers, so you can restrict who has access to the speakers, unless you want anyone with network access to be able to choose volume, music content, etc. 

Ok, final update.

So… I did it! There were three problems that I had that greatly increased the difficulty of the whole process

One, the guest wifi apparently had some limitations on data sharing that I unaware of, and it kept wanting to default to that wifi, and I didn’t think to try the other.

The second issue was that the app for android is really awful. Slow, and glitchy, I would see my speaker pop up and then disappear before I could attempt to set it up. I ended up using an ipad to get the ball rolling. For further context, I have an S9, so its not like I was using a stoneage android device.

Third, I had to perform a hard reset for every unit that I had tried to set up on the guest wifi prior. Although several people on the board say not to, it worked really well to get the remaining speakers on track.

All in, once I had the right connection and understood the lights, the process wasn’t too terrible, it was just WAY more involved than I expected, and being pulled away every 5-10min to do other things in the office just made it seem entirely too cumbersome. I am not sure if anything I typed here will help others in the future, but I hope so.

Thanks for all the helpful comments!!

Now to see if it works for us in the actual shop environment… Fingers crossed!