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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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Corry P

Sonos Staff

Hi @ybl84f1

I’m glad to hear you’re now able to enjoy your Move as intended! Thanks for updating us with what fixed it for you, too.

Thank you also for the feedback.

Equip your 1-800 support team with this debug information, you’ll save yourself money and reduce customer frustration, churn and product return. I started with phone support, and even after sending diagnostic information from the app several times over the course of more than an hour their suggestions addressing this issue were completely irrelevant or useless.

We do have this information, but only in relation to the Asus RT-AC68U, whereas you have mentioned a RT-AC86U. I’ll see if we can get this updated. Thank you.

Consider having a router-specific self-help section; it would have been much easier for me and less expensive for Sonos to simply have an “ASUS” page of FAQs, BKMs and settings to reference, especially since at the end of the day it was simply 2 settings that needed toggling.

A good idea, which I’ll look into. Unfortunately, most users don’t think of their router being the problem until they’ve already contacted us (usually because devices that aren't interested in talking to each other can talk to the internet). Also, there are a lot of routers out there, and a lot of different ways people can install/configure them. This information is available to our technical support agents, however.

Diagnostics: There’s absolutely no reason the Sonos app could not have automatically diagnosed this and provided more guidance for correcting it instead of leaving it to the consumer. At first bootup of the Move the Sonos app could communicate at least enough with the Move to register it, then failed to see it at all after registration. So somehow they were able to connect initially which means they could coordinate to help debug a network issue.

This would increase complexity, and complexity increases problems. Considering all the possibilities, it would also be very difficult to code and would likely often be less than helpful if incorrect. I do see your point, however, and more helpful setup messaging could be added, perhaps with links to help pages.

Also, as noted many times above, in cases where the Move fails in a multi-band network the Move could fall back to 2.4Ghz to operate. This may not be ideal but it is a solution that could be presented to the user as an option or to help debug in a diagnostics mode. Again a wireless Play1 should not outperform a brand-new Move that is designed to be portable.

Is it the Move that failed? From it’s point of view, it got connected, but the network failed it. Given that the Move doesn’t know if it can’t connect to the App because you’ve left the house with your phone or if there’s a problem with the network, I don’t see how this could be reliable. In addition, some people turn off their speakers when not in use, so having the rest of the system freak out when they do this wouldn’t be ideal.

Having a restriction to 2.4GHz as an option for speakers that can connect to 5GHz is a good idea, however.

You can currently prevent the Move from connecting to 5GHz by not telling it the credentials for that band (though the bands do need to be separate).

Thanks to those that provided helpful and meaningful guidance. If there’s any final questions about the network setup or something you would like me to try let me know otherwise I think we can close out this thread.

You’re very welcome! The thread will be closed automatically when there has been no activity on it for a while.

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

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