Is Sonos Fit For Purpose?

I have 10 Sonos devices scattered throughout my home with one Sonos Play:1 wired directly to a standard Motorola cable modem/router. All of my Sonos speakers work great and my house is loaded with at least 30-40 different smart home devices and electronic gadgets.

Despite our earnest hopes Sonos has unfortunately never been able to change the laws of physics.

Do you have any control over the Tenda mesh wireless channels? Many of these WiFi meshes take the position that they know best and won’t let you change the channels. 

Sonos doesn’t always get along very well with these meshes. Optimal performance in Sonos groups (and stereo pairs) depends on the relevant nodes sharing the same channel, so they can communicate directly peer-to-peer. If Sonos nodes attach to different mesh access points, which in turn are using different channels, the P2P optimisation is defeated.

I would recommend reinstalling the Boost, at least as an experiment. Wire it to the primary Tenda unit. Try alternative SonosNet channels.

There are hidden tools which a user can access to get a flavour of how well SonosNet is doing, but these are limited. Sonos Support can see much more from a submitted diagnostic.

By the way, which version of the software are you running? Your profile lists Play:5/gen1, which only runs S1, and Five, which only runs S2.

@ratty Thank you very much for your help.

I will share you message above with my IT support team.

I’m running S1 as I have too many old units to switch to S2. I have no interest in Alexa or similar so it it doesn't represent any disadvantage to me. I have noticed though that newer units do seem to cope better than older ones…

It has been suggested that if you don't need the new functionality of S2, S1 is just as good for everything else.

Would you recommend reinstalling the boost connected directly to the DrayTek router or the Tenda unit nearest the router? Or, would I be better off connecting one or more speakers to Tenda units?

Do multiple boosts and or wired units help?
 

The Tenda Mesh is tri-band with all three frequencies in use across 4 access pint with a fifth planned.

Surely, this will make it impossible to put Sonos on an exclusive frequency?

Alexa and Google Home will work with both S1 and S2 systems, just FYI.  And yes, the more modern units will have more modern WiFi radios in them.

The Tenda unit nearest the router.

Unless you’ve explicitly put the Tenda into bridge mode, a Boost wired to the Draytek would be on a different subnet from the WiFi, so the system would be inaccessible.

Don’t wire to any of the satellite Tenda units. It can cause all kinds of problems.

Sometimes, yes. But such extra wired Sonos units (a) need to be wired as above, not to any WiFi satellites and (b) they’d need to be decently spaced out from the primary Boost to be worthwhile.

It sounds like Tenda makes its own mind up, which as I say can impair Sonos performance if it uses the mesh WiFi.

For SonosNet there are 3 channel choices. See which performs best.

If I may make a suggestion: leave such people out of it. A complete noob, I fixed my network issues myself back in 2011-12 via learning enough about network hardware to do this, and to keep Sonos working fine till now through additions of things like WiFi access points in the home to extend WiFi reach for other gadgets. Or to fix any small glitches that very occasionally arose in that time.

All it takes is some logical thinking. And help at times, that, as far as Sonos operations are concerned, is of better quality here, I would say.

I even learnt how to make my own ethernet cables from bulk cable and loose terminals, but I doubt you will need to do that!

The other point is that none of my fixes, other than ethernet wiring of some units, needed the spending of any money and neither should yours as long as you still have the Boost with you.

I have 8 units on "normal" WiFi, not Sonosnet and never had a problem with dropouts or dead speakers.

Even 30 meters down the garden with the Move (or Play:1).

I'm on S1 and sticking with it as long as possible.

Virgin Media Superhub 2 router as well so nothing flash (declined the SH3).