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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.

Ok, so I sincerely doubt that this is going to help anyone else… but: here’s where I’ve got to so far:

  • I binned all my other network gear and went all in on Ubiquiti managed gear. (I was thinking about doing this anyway for various reasons)
  • I created a special compatibility Wifi network just for the Sonos gear, served by the same APs that we connect phones etc to (this is a really handy feature of the Ubiquiti gear); I turned on  IoT compatibility mode for this network to force all the speakers onto 2.4ghz
  • I moved all my Sonos gear to this wifi network, which entailed resetting a bunch of the speakers (the ones that don’t support remote network update)
  • I connected all my Sonos gear via Wifi. Notwithstanding Pools-3015’s opinion, this is one of the configurations recommended for Sonos by Ubiquiti and I’ve personally found it works much better than having anything wired. It probably helps that we have extremely good wifi coverage throughout the house. Having any of the devices wired means that SonosNet can potentially come into play. I can’t fully disable wireless on all the devices because that prevents pairing a Sub/surrounds with my Beam and I can’t get ethernet cabling to all my speakers. Plus even switching from RSTP to STP I don’t really trust anything about the wired setup implementation. It doesn’t seem like Sonos does either, because the newer devices (AIUI) no longer do SonosNet (thank god)
  • I’ve given all the Sonos gear fixed IPs

 

For the moment Airplay is now working on the Beam, but TBH I have no idea whether anything that I’ve done above is actually relevant to that. The key test will be to see if it _stays_ working for more than 48 hours. Fingers crossed.

….and it’s broken again. I had everything working fine for < 24 hours. In the meantime I haven’t changed anything in either the Sonos configuration or my Ubiquiti config. Last night it was working; this morning I got up and it’s not. And I can say confidently from past experience that once it’s broken, it stays broken. So far the only thing I’ve found that fixes it is completely resetting the Beam and re-adding it to the system. Just power-cycling it doesn’t fix it. And, to be clear, this is the only device out of 6 Airplay-compatible devices, all on the same network and half on the same Wifi access point, that exhibit this behaviour. It very much feels like there’s something specifically wrong with the Beam at this point. I don’t know if that’s a hardware failure of some sort - which seems unlikely given that it works for a bit after reset; or some kind of strange bug that takes a little while to trigger but somehow puts the Beam into a state from which it can’t recover. I’m guessing that in either case I’m screwed since Sonos’ support is essentially non-existent at this point and I’m well out of warranty. Sigh.

Ok i think i may have the answer. Sonos support in Spain is essentially non-existent, but i called though to UK support and got a very helpful guy who actually seemed to know what he was talking about it. We tried a bunch of different diagnostics and he agreed that the symptoms were super weird. But then in passing he mentioned something that I investigated more fully later and appears like it may have solved my problem. 
 

At some point in the past I had played around with HomeKit; it appears that the Beam was the only speaker registered with my  HomeKit home, and the permission settings  were on the most restrictive setting (only registered users). Since deleting my HomeKit home and factory resetting the Beam again, it looks like it’s now working and staying working.

Moral of the story: if Airplay is finding your speakers but failing instantly when you try to connect, check out your HomeKit settings.

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