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I have a Beam + Amp + Sub home theatre setup. I also have a mixture of other speakers throughout the rest of the house - another Amp, a couple of Era 100s, a couple of Play 1s and a One. They’re all running on wireless on the same network via multiple Unifi WIFI APs.

Generally speaking, everything is working ok after several months of chaos, but there a few remaining niggles. The most problematic is that I can’t Airplay to the Beam. It immediately fails with the error ’Unable to connect to “Living Room”’. The behaviour is consistent and exactly the same from a wide variety of different Apple devices. I can successfully Airplay to all the other speakers/Amp in the system that support Airplay, including  some on the same WIFI AP as the Beam. The other day I finally got round to trying to sort this out, and I factory reset the Beam and re-added it. I was happy to see that after doing so Airplay now worked, and I thought that was the end of the matter.

Sadly, a day later, it’s back to doing exactly the same thing it did before. Nothing I can think of has changed in the meantime. I know the standard advice at this point would be to “reset my router” but that’s pretty meaningless at this point; it worked briefly and nothing has changed about my network in the few intervening hours. I fail to see how restarting the router is going to change that.

 

I was hoping to contact Sonos support but it would seem that despite whatever it says on the website, support is never available either on the phone or chat here in Spain. Is my Beam just broken? Or is this another casualty of the spectacularly botched new app? (I’m a software developer and whoever managed this disaster needs to reconsider their career choices)

If you are going to reject the most common suggestion, also solution there isn't a lot we users here can do to help.

Same when you require detailed networking tutoring before trying something.

If you want help folks here will try if you haven't told them up front you don't want to hear it.

I don’t think I’ll require “detailed network tutoring”; I’m a full stack web software engineer with 2 decades of experience so I think I can handle a home network setup.


But I’m happy to try anything. As mentioned in my previous post, I factory reset the Beam and that fixed it for a few hours, but now it’s not working again. I’ve just rebooted my router (that runs the DHCP server for the network) and that hasn’t made any difference; I also tried rebooting the AP that the beam is connected to - which honestly shouldn’t make any difference to Airplay since it’s a Layer 7 protocol but whatever - and that made no difference either.

 

Is there something else I should be trying?

 

I should add that when I have had intermittent problems in the past with either Airplay or Spotify Connect, the devices either fail to show up in the list (broken discovery) or they show up, but when you try and connect to them it thinks for ages and then times out (suggestive of some kind of connection failure).


My current problem is different: the Beam shows up reliably in the list of airplay devices, but when you try connecting to it, it fails immediately with the “Unable to connect” error. So I guess it’s either a routing failure (somehow trying to connect to the wrong IP on the network), or it can route to the Beam ok but is either getting hard rejected at the Tcp/ip level or getting some kind of AirPlay protocol error.

I have 11 speakers on a Unifi network and I have followed the suggested configurations for the best connectivity between Sonos and Unifi.

While I believe WIFI has come a long way and is suitable for many things, I still believe a wired Sonos system is still the best solution.

Here is what I have done to avoid any issues:

Configure the Unifi network to work with Sonos. This includes STP settings on my main and downlink switches, mDNS and IGMP snooping settings.

Hardwire as many speakers/devices and I was able to. Main speakers such as the Arc, Five Amp and Connect. Then wirelessly connect the Sub and surrounds to the Arc. I also have a Five that is wireless because I move it around from place to place.

Assign static IP addresses for ALL my Sonos products from within the Network app.

I use the Mac app when I need to configure something with my NAS (post new app), but I have always done that because I spend a lot of time in front of that computer.

I have my Sonos system on the same network as my iPhones, computers and tablets to avoid and issues when software/firmware updates from Apple, Sonos or Ubiquiti may present a problem.

Sure the app has its issues and I am one of the luck ones who have had minor issues or inconveniences with the new app release.

I am a network administrator and wanted something simple for my home network that still offered some robust configuration and functionality, without making it feel like work. Ubiquiti delivers that for me.

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