Thanks for completely breaking £2000 worth of Sonos gear

Try a chill pill, things are normally easier to solve and less stressful when 2 chill pills are taken up to four times a day.

Chicks: Thanks for the suggestions. Already, one Play 5 in the front room is connected via ethernet as well as the soundbar in the family room.

Could you tell me how I assign static IP addresses to each speaker? I can't find anything in the Sonos settings so is it something I have to do through the router?

My first reaction is to simply ignore an aggressive post but here goes anyways.

If everyone was having the same difficulties as you are this would be serious indeed. My system is probably as complex as yours yet works well with the latest updates. It would therefore appear your issue might be particular to your setup.

When I have run into a problem over the 6 years I have used Sonos products, I have found Sonos technical support excellent at figuring out what the issue was and helping me resolve it. Rather than going online and "yelling" at everyone, I suggest you try them.

As to the design of the app or the feature content of an upgrade, simply referring to it as a "dog's dinner abomination" is not, in my opinion, particularly constructive or useful feedback. I have found that Sonos do value their customer's input, so maybe a bit more specificity in the appropriate forum section as to suggested likes or dislikes would be more productive.

I hope your system is back up and working in short order.

@Meezer - thanks for telling me how great you thiink Sonos are. Sadly, this is scant consolation right now and I'm frankly exhausted after several hours of trying to get everything working again. I'm powering everything down and going to bed. If it doesn't get solved tomorrow, the lot goes on ebay.

I'm delighted for everyone here who doesn't have a problem, really.

I am always amazed at the smug people who insist that something that worked perfectly well before an update and now doesn’t is somehow pure coincidence.... ..what caused the problem then?..the wind?...bit like the guy that drove into the back of me last week...apparently the dented bumper i had afterwards that was a spooky coincidence....seems to me it’s not to much to ask that something that's advertised as rock solid and no drop outs should meet that ....at least once in a while....

I am always amazed at the smug people who insist that something that worked perfectly well before an update and now doesn’t is somehow pure coincidence.... ..what caused the problem then?..the wind?...bit like the guy that drove into the back of me last week...apparently the dented bumper i had afterwards that was a spooky coincidence....seems to me it’s not to much to ask that something that's advertised as rock solid and no drop outs should meet that ....at least once in a while....You might care to note that my original reply did not suggest coincidence. In fact, has anyone suggested coincidence in this thread? Beyond that, I won't be rising to your bait.

I am always amazed at the smug people who insist that something that worked perfectly well before an update and now doesn’t is somehow pure coincidence.... ..what caused the problem then?..the wind?
Though the wind could actually be causing issues, as it can have an effect on wireless performance, usually issues that come up after an update are caused as a result of the Sonos players restarting on the network.

The most common causes of post-update issues are routers that assign duplicate IP addresses on reboot, or wireless devices doing a channel scan at the time of restart and deciding that the wireless channel Sonos was on is now clear, and switching to use that one. When Sonos comes back up, suddenly the once clear wireless is now no longer clear. A third common cause of problems after an update is that there were problems, to begin with, and Sonos had been chugging along without knowing about it. The most likely case here is in a double NAT situation, where you have two DHCP servers on the network and Sonos was all connected to one of the two, but during the reboot, some players got caught up on the second one.

The reason the community starts with recommending reboots on the network devices is because that will often solve the issue. It will fix the first one above, potentially the third one, and possibly could the second, but that's hard to say.

@Geoff Simmonds, I'd be happy to take a closer look at your setup if you're still having trouble. Are you currently seeing some of your players? If so, could you submit a diagnostic from your Sonos system and reply back with your confirmation number? Any details you can provide would be great to help narrow down what's happening.

I am always amazed at the smug people who insist that something that worked perfectly well before an update and now doesn’t is somehow pure coincidence.... ..what caused the problem then?..the wind?...bit like the guy that drove into the back of me last week...apparently the dented bumper i had afterwards that was a spooky coincidence....seems to me it’s not to much to ask that something that's advertised as rock solid and no drop outs should meet that ....at least once in a while....

It is not smugness, it is years of experience with what happens to a small number of folks after an update and what works to fix it.

What causes these problems it is most often duplicate IP addresses. What makes these IP duplicates show up is the update process, which entails a reboot of each Sonos device, causing it to request a new IP. If your router is in a bad state where it's table of previously assigned IP addresses is lost due to a reboot or power failure, the Sonos requests for new IPs can result in a series of duplicate IP addresses being issued. So while the "cause" of these duplicates may be the update process, the actual software is not at fault, nor could Sonos do anything to prevent the bad state of your router's IP assignment table.

Same thing with the other problems mentioned by the Sonos representative above, a reboot of the Sonos system may cause the router to switch channels, but that too is neither a flaw in the Sonos software, nor is it anything Sonos could prevent. Ditto if you are running more than one DHCP server.

Luckily there are permanent fixes to all of these, reserve IP addresses in your router, set your WiFi to a fixed range of channels, and eliminate multiple DHCP servers by configuring one of your network devices as a router and the rest as wireless access points

I'd like to apologise unreservedly for being a petulant and annoying "something or other" yesterday. I'd spent the previous 3 hours battling with the Sonos setup in the flat which was working fine before the update and which absolutely wasn't afterwards. I'm afraid nerd rage got the better of me and I feel somewhat embarrassed. Apologies to anybody I may have offended which is quite likely given the shouty nature of my first post the sardonic tone of my subsequent ones.

That said, I'm still quite unhappy with the status quo. After powering everything down last night and switching on this morning, all my speakers are visible and work, although the controller app is not as responsive as it was in terms of changing the volume and muting / un-muting rooms. But most annoying of all is the fact that the surround sound is awful....It drops out constantly and is not practically useable.

@Ryan S, I'll have a look tomorrow at submitting a diagnostic. I can't spend any more time right now on it as other tasks beckon, along with a general lack of enthusiasm to tinker further.

Geoff,

One thing that you didn't mention, that I'd recommend highly, is a reboot of your router while all of the speakers are turned off/unplugged. A reset of IP addresses might help some of the issues you're reporting, and just turning off the speakers doesn't quite do it, as the data is also stored on the router.

And definitely go with the diagnostic, when you can. There's a wealth of information in it that can help Ryan and his cohorts help you a lot, more than those of us speculating on the situation based on the data we've been provided.