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Is Sonos Move a $400 paperweight? When did Sonos give up making products that work?

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Wow I used to admire Sonos - my Play:1, Connect, Playbar & sub all connected through wifi worked great. Now I just spent $400 on a Move and the thing is erratic and useless - the app shows it offline, then it disappears completely, then it re-appears, it plays music for an hour and then it disconnects….when did Sonos give up making products that work? The Move is a $400 piece-of-junk paperweight.

I have 2 Asus APs with different SSIDs - no extenders, nothing else - pretty simple. None of the Sonos products are wired. (I mention this because I believe it means there is no SonosNet which I think means that all my speakers are using my wifi network just as Move is supposed to; at least that’s my understanding). After an hour out-of-the-box trying everything I could think of I finally got the Move connected, registered and updated. At this point I thought I was done and had another piece of solid Sonos gear on my network. When powered it down it then appeared “offline”, but when I powered it up it completely disappeared from the app - POOF GONE! Power down and it says its offline, power up and its POOF GONE! The firmware in it is idiotic. Then it suddenly became usable and worked for 45 minutes before the app lost its connection to the Move, and then the whole cycle repeated. My unboxing video is going to make great entertainment on YouTube.

I called tech support - the good news is I only waited 5-6 minutes. The bad news is, after 5-6 minutes I was hung up on. Okay - go through that a second time. Tech support said I had 2 repeaters and to disconnect them. I told them multiple times I have NO REPEATERS, only two APs. Then they told me the Move was trying to connect to the other AP although I have never configured the app for the other AP. And BTW tech support if that was the case, if another unconfigured AP could cause these issues, wouldn’t both my neighbors’ APs that penetrate my home do the same? I’m not a network guy but that logic escapes me.

Most amazing is that my other Sonos speakers work perfectly fine on my network. Perfectly. Period. Two of them are on stands that I move all around the house...sounds like what a Move should do, right? So can anyone at Sonos explain why you just didn’t take the working software from my Play:1 that I move all around the house and which works perfectly fine with my very simple wifi network and use that in the Move? Did anyone at Sonos even beta test this product before they shipped it? I have read online over and over many stories of people with the exact same issues.

So this $400 piece-of-junk Move paperweight appears to be a FAIL. Please don’t suggest I go into the bowels of my router and start changing some arcane settings because I’ll jut reply that if my other Sonos products work on my wifi network then there’s no reason a Move shouldn’t.

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melvimbe

@melvimbe - somehow you equate “it doesn’t work for others” with “the product doesn’t work for anyone”...it’s unclear how you find equivalence between those two statements, you seem to want to make more of what is actually written than what’s there.

I didn’t equate the two statements at all. That was actually my point. Your thread title implies ‘doesn’t work for anyone’ and yet you acknowledge in the body that it actually does work (which is obvious) for others.

Regarding whether its a firmware problem, you may not understand wifi silicon but read the prior post; in no situation should a 2.4/5 Ghz wifi chip fail where a 2.4 Ghz chip works. The wifi silicon in the Move is a superset of the Play1; the firmware in the speaker could disable the 5 Ghz and fallback to 2.4 Ghz, essentially making it indistinguishable from (a working) Play1 on the network. Although its a slower speed it 1) is an option and 2) is better then having a Sonos paperweight.

I didn’t conclude anything about the source of the issue at all. My point was that the assumptions you made don’t eliminate any other alternative but a firmware issue. I get your point that you think the radio should default to 2.4 if there are issues with 5.0, which does not conclude that’s the source of your specific issue is that firmware isn’t switching from 5.0 to 2.4 properly.

As far as “Your experience is not what consumers can typically expect and thus can be misleading” I’m not sure how my real-life experience can be misleading - it’s actually what happened. Period. As far as your judgement as to whether consumers can expect this or not it’s pretty simple - IT JUST HAPPENED! Your judgement of "typical” may be biased because what you don’t see in this forum is all the people that had this issue and just gave up and never came here. You may want to look up “Survivorship Bias” in statistics.

Yes education is only valuable if it’s accurate!

I don’t know how you are equating ‘typical’ experience with your own personal experience. That is my point. If your point about my ability to conclude what is or isn’t typical experience, since I am not familiar with everyone’s experience, has merit...then it applies to you as well.

Danny

J

John B

Have you tried turning off SmartConnect, which actually is anything but smart? It could plausibly sabotage a device capable of connecting to both bands. I am not saying I am confident this is the answer, just that it is worth a shot.

Worth turning off QoS too.

(This may have been mentioned already, but I can't be bothered to check.)

J

John B

As to the discussion on logic between @melvimbe and @ybl84f1 , @melvimbe is clearly correct.

"When did Sonos stop making products that work?" clearly implies that no Move unit would work. Disproving this therefore only requires one counter example. In fact we have several.

Y

ybl84f1Author

Trending Lyricist I

@Xander P - thanks for the suggestions, those settings unfortunately had no effect. Note on the latest RT-AC86U firmware:

Under Advanced Settings/LAN/IPTV tab:

Enable Multicast Routing (IGMP Proxy) - there is no mention of “IGMP Proxy”
Efficient Multicast Forwarding (IGMP Snooping.) - this doesn’t exist.

FYI the other setting under Advanced Settings/Wireless/Professional tab (“Enable IGMP Snooping”) does indeed exist.

Just to reiterate, the error experienced is in this configuration is:

All other Sonos products (all on wifi) work perfectly,
the Sonos Move status is “* Offline” when powered down,
and when powered up it completely disappears from the device list. “Find Missing Players” yields nothing.

As soon as the Move powers up and (I presume) gets on the network it disappears from the list of devices.

I will try the hard reset as the last resort unless Sonos have any other suggestions. After that I’m afraid it’s going back to the Sonos warehouse for refurbishing, and perhaps a video of how to strap a lithium battery to a Play1 is in order for all the folks who can’t get a Move to work!

J

John B

Disable SmartConnect and QoS. May work, may not.

Y

ybl84f1Author

Trending Lyricist I

@John B “"When did Sonos stop making products that work?” - whatever you may assume it implies is irrelevant, the fact of the matter is 100% of the Sonos products I’ve purchased in the last year have failed. So from my perspective the question is perfectly valid.

I will try the two settings you describe although it likely won’t be until next week.

J

John B

OK let's stop arguing. I hope those settings do cure your problem. Although you say that a device with a 5GHz card as well as 2.4 should do everything a device with just 2.4 can do, it does depend on how the router handles the connection, and whether it allows the device to communicate with other devices that are on a different band. You have to consider the interoperability of the whole system, not just a single device.

That is why I think there is a chance - only a chance - that changing those settings will help.

Please post back whichever way it goes.

Corry P

Sonos Staff

Hi @ybl84f1

When your Move is on, but the app doesn’t show it as connected, does it work? As in, can you ask it to play something via voice command, from within the Spotify app or via AirPlay?

If you can get the Move to play while the Sonos app says it’s offline, then the issue is with your network not allowing your Move and your app to communicate with each other. Try connecting your phone/tablet to another AP/frequency.

If you have a computer with an ethernet connection, does the Sonos Move show on that while it doesn’t show on your phone? If so, this would be indicative of wireless isolation or a guest network in use.

"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen." - Albert Einstein

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ybl84f1Author

Trending Lyricist I

Hi @Corry P , I’ve been offline for several days so have not tried @John B ‘s suggestion or yours.

I do not have/use Spotify or AirPlay but that is something I suppose I could try. But - before going down that additional rabbit hole, realize how backwards it is to have to use 3rd party apps to debug a Sonos issue. Again I’ll reiterate the most important point - I have 5 different Sonos products, some many, many years old, that work perfectly on this network and with the Sonos app, and then a brand new Move breaks it. Even if you go down the “its a 5 ghz problem” the Move is perfectly capably of falling back to 2.4 Ghz and acting like a Play1. There is absolutely no reason a Move should fail where a Play1 works perfectly, period.

It will probably be a day or two before I can try your and John’s tests - I will report back as soon as I do. Appreciate the help.

Y

ybl84f1Author

Trending Lyricist I

@Corry P , @Xander P , @John B ,

Wanted to let you know I’m still working on this...I really don’t want to post any results because my experience has been all over the map...everything from it working perfectly to the Move (yet again) just disappearing, and then to everything _but_ the Move disappearing. I had devices all working but after a while, although they all showed normal when I hit play (on any of them, not just Move) it said it could not connect to the device. So my results are really inconclusive.

It kinda feels like perhaps after changing a router setting I might need to reset both routers and force all the devices to reattach - I’d be interested in BKMs such as whether that is true and whether I should reduce my Sonos network to just the Move and say one other device for simplicity. It feels like I need to reduce this to a single variable at a time with a complete cold boot of both APs. (Of course I’m limited as to when I can do this kind of testing since it brings the entire house down).

Anyways a quick recap although the results are all over the map. Turning off SmartConnect was a mess - all devices (including Move) connected except for my sound bar and sub (which are the most reliable devices on my Sonos network). Turning SmartConnect back on resulted in all devices reconnecting, except the Move which went back to disappearing when powered on. (But again I did not reboot either APs).

@Xander P after applying those settings you suggested (except for the Efficient Multicast Forwarding (IGMP Snooping which doesn’t exist) and undoing all other changes it seemed to work...for quite a while...until I woke up in the morning and again all the Sonos devices except Move were working, and again Move would show offline when powered off and disappear when powered on. And then all by itself, later today, without changing anything I lost all connectivity to every Sonos device for the entire day; I did the “find missing devices” process - nothing, completely gone until this evening when I rebooted the AC86U.

So trying to simplify my debugging of the Move firmware this where I am right now:

No changes to the AC3200 (repeater) AP.
Reset AC86U (main router hanging off cable modem) to default settings.
DID NOT ENABLE: IPTV tab/Enable Multicast Routing (IGMP Proxy)
DID Advanced Settings/Wireless/Professional tab: Enable IGMP Snooping

As of right now, Wed evening it’s been up for 30 minutes and everything works perfectly. I’m going to let this sit tonight and see what happens in the morning.

I am astonished my 5+ year old Play1 outperforms a brand new $400 Move!

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