A bit more clarity, if you’d be so kind. There is no 5, nor a 1. Do you have a Sonos Five, or a Sonos PLAY:5? If the latter, do you know which generation? Do you have Sonos Ones, or Sonos PLAY:1s?
How do you have these speakers connected? Are they directly on your WiFi signal, or do you have a speaker, or BOOST hooked up? What kind of router are you running, make and model? Is it a mesh device, or a single point router? What channel is it using?
Usually, grouping issues are a result of a certain amount of wifi interference . Can happen on either a wireless (Wifi) or wired (SonosNet) system. It doesn’t have to be a lot, so that it wouldn’t bother pairs of speakers, but just enough to deal with larger ‘groups’ of speakers.
The speaker you start the group from becomes the “group co-ordinator’ and manages the grouped play across the group. The best choice to start the group from is therefore the one with the most stable connection. I suspect your connections for some of the speakers are borderline, most likely because of interference, as suggested by @Airgetlam .
Sonos non-portable speakers are also capable of using direct routing within a group, and so the positions of speakers and distances between them can be relevant.
The differences you see depending on which speaker you started the group from are therefore not really surprising.
Thanks for the responses. I factory reset the Move and reset the Play:5 (C100, my first speaker, tried to factory reset but it’s not having it). Both are now behaving as expected..except I cannot factory reset the Play:5, but with any luck I won’t have to!
Man was I not remembering proper Sonos product names last night!
It’s easy to do. I’m not overly fond of the naming conventions Sonos uses, but it makes a difference in how we answer. For instance, you couldn’t group a PLAY:5 Gen 1 with a Roam at all, since they run different OS (S1 and S2), but newer generations of the PLAY:5 can run S2, so those can group with a Roam.
I’m semi concerned about not being able to factory reset your PLAY:5, it should follow the rules as laid out in the factory reset FAQ, but then if it’s working as you want, I’d be a fan of letting sleeping dogs lie. However, the next time you feel the need, it might be worth calling 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 Sonos system and network.
