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Alarm predictably failures

  • March 31, 2026
  • 1 reply
  • 9 views
J

I have had Sonos in one form or another for 15 years and have four groups in my home and shed. There are 6 alarms set to tune to particular radio stations.  The instability of the alarms with recent updates is frustrating.  


Sometimes it will start on two separate rooms that are set up as one connection, so they have different connections and one seconds behind synchronous broadcasting. 


None of the alarms is stable enough to run for the allocated time, they might only run a few seconds, or a few minutes. If I go to my IOS app the system already shows it has stopped and the right arrow is ready to press. 


I have also had to go through trying to trace why some stations are disconnected from the stream and I get the horrible ding dong alarm sound. I wish there was a better option for that too. 
 

cheers John

1 reply

Airgetlam
  • Airgetlam
  • March 31, 2026

The chime occurs when the Sonos device can’t ‘reach’ the desired network device at the moment the alarm is trying to play. There’s a plethora of potential reasons for it to be unable to reach the stream, most of which can be identified by Sonos when submitting a system diagnostic within 10 minutes of experiencing this problem, and calling Sonos Support to discuss it.

Common issues, which are hard to determine from your post, are simple local network issues like duplicate IP addresses (or other network issues), or a server being overwhelmed by requests at a specific time, which can be gotten around by moving the alarm a few minutes earlier, or later to see if the source then plays. It would help if Sonos owned all servers that feed content, but they don’t. 

I don’t frequently use my Sonos for alarm duty, but understand your desire for another choice of sounds. I suspect the alarm sounds are somewhat restricted by the memory on the ‘smallest’ Sonos device, but it’s a worthy request.

The challenge for Sonos is whether they play a chime to honor your alarm time, or wait until the network can reach the desired content. I suspect Sonos errs on the side of playing the alarm on time, since they probably can’t figure out when the actual desired resource will be available…it could be seconds, minutes, or even ‘never’ from their perspective. 

Bruce
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