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I’ve been talking to different customer service reps at Sonos for the last three hours to try to figure out two things: Why, after working fine in May and June, TV audio skips (like record scratches) when I group my Ray to my Roam SL and/or my Era 100; and why, when playing audio via Bluetooth through either the Era 100 or the Roam SL, the audio starts to skip once any other speaker (or both other speakers) are connected to it. I was told that using other speakers (not subs or surround speakers) to simply play TV audio in other rooms is “unsupported,” period (even though on this forum, there are multiple examples of people getting that to work within the last year!); and I was told that sharing Bluetooth audio in this way was also “unsupported,” but that this was one of the app update issues, and that it should be reinstated in the app soon (when? lol who knows). 

For the TV audio, delaying the audio by a lot cleared the problem up entirely, I have no idea why the rep didn’t just suggest that. 

For the Bluetooth audio, according to this page in Sonos support, sharing Bluetooth audio with a system group should (currently ) be a nonissue: https://support.sonos.com/en-us/article/share-roam-s-bluetooth-audio-with-your-sonos-system

So I’m just wondering if anyone else is having the same problem with Bluetooth audio sharing within a Sonos group, and if there’s potentially a simple fix here that I can implement sooner than whenever the app magically and without warning reinstates this feature?

Hi @backgroundbird 

Welcome to the Sonos Community!

Sorry to hear of the issues you’ve had with inconsistent grouping performance.

I’m not sure that “unsupported” is the correct description for grouping TV audio, but there are certainly caveats - it depends heavily on your network for reliable playback. Generally, when preparing audio for synchronised playback across multiple rooms, the audio is delayed enough to ensure that all the speakers will receive the audio that they are supposed to play at a certain timestamp - the speaker in charge of a group can easily do this, as there is no picture to try to stay in sync with. With TV audio, the speaker in charge of the group (the one connected to the TV) will not delay the audio at all, in the interest of keeping in sync with a TV picture. Therefore, the audio used to not be buffered, and grouping for TV audio was not supported, but could work if a network was particularly healthy and free of other, heavy traffic.

Since then, however, we have added the delay function to which you refer, which basically buffers the TV audio before sending it to other rooms - I would personally argue that this means that we now support playback of TV audio to other rooms, though we certainly cannot guarantee that the other rooms will be in sync with the first.

I also don’t know why the agent you spoke to did not recommend this step - our apologies!

For the Bluetooth audio, according to this page in Sonos support, sharing Bluetooth audio with a system group should (currently ) be a nonissue: https://support.sonos.com/en-us/article/share-roam-s-bluetooth-audio-with-your-sonos-system

I concur - there should be no issue with grouping Bluetooth to other rooms, but that does not mean that there is no reason for the issue - WiFi interference could be a key factor.

Due to the natures of the problem and of this communication channel, I can only recommend you get back in touch with our technical support team for some real-time troubleshooting.

I hope they are able to assist.

 

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