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Constant Issues with Sonos Five & Roam

  • 3 February 2023
  • 2 replies
  • 252 views
A

Hi,

 

I’ve had the Sonos Five & Sonos Roam for a few months now. Almost every night I attempt to listen to music with my partner while hanging out/making dinner and it feels like every night I experience a different issue and it turns into a 30 mins-45 minute ordeal just to get music working.  In no particular order or frequency it is one of the following:

  • Sonos Five disppears from Sonos app
  • Sonos Roam disappears from Sonos app
  • Sonos Roam appears to be ‘Powered Off’ when it is in fact powered on
  • Sonos Roam appears to be in ‘Sleep Mode’
  • Sonos Five & Sonos Roam both appear in the app, but I cannot connect to them through Spotify
  • Both Sonos Roam & Sonos Five appear in the app, and I can stream music to one or the other, but not both at the same time

It’s a nightmare every time I want to try to listen to music. I’ve tried ALL the basic troubleshooting steps:

  • Powered Off & Back On
  • Unpugged & Plugged Back in
  • Ensured that the roam is fully charged
  • Pressed ALL the buttons on the roam to attempt to wake it up
  • Long pressed (5 seconds) on the power button both from a starting position of off and from a starting position of on
  • Factory reset the roam
  • Removed & re-added both Roam and Five from my sonos app and started the setup process completely from scratch

I thought they might be one-off issues, but it has been weeks of consistent problems now.

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Best answer by Ken_Griffiths 4 February 2023, 02:51

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Ken_Griffiths

It sounds more like a network issue and so you ‘may’ be looking in the wrong place to try to fix your issue.

If the two ‘often missing’ Sonos products are listed in the ‘About Box’ in the Sonos App then it’s possibly a controller ‘discovery’ issue. Check that you are able to ‘ping’ the missing devices and  that they are in fact present on the LAN (subnet). If they are present and connected then maybe something in the detail/info. below may help you to find an answer to your discovery issue…

The discovery of the Sonos products by the Sonos controller is a slightly complex area to explore, but briefly… 

SSDP (the UPnP simple service discovery protocol) is used to initially discover the Sonos players and is done via multicasting via UDP to 239.255.255.250:1900 and, for good measure, broadcasting to 255.255.255.255:1900. 

Thereafter communication is unicast.

Both the Sonos players and controllers must share the same network subnet. However if the Sonos devices are connecting to multiple access points, the recommendations (from myself) are that they be set to the same WiFi channel and channel-width. This is for optimum performance particularly in groups and for some reason with mesh-based WiFi systems, it appears some will work okay with Sonos, but others may not, particularly if the satellites/AP’s are perhaps auto-selecting their own WiFi channels …and to help solve any issues arising, many here in the community often suggest using SonosNet (wired mode) for Sonos device-discovery/communication instead. That will only help though with the Sonos Five in your case as the Roam is not compatible with SonosNet.

In Sonos Networking my understanding is a packet can be sent to:

  • A single host - Unicast - (TCP and UDP)
  • All hosts - Broadcast – (UDP only)
  • A group of hosts – Multicast - (UDP only)

Broadcast messages are not sent through routers, but multicast messages are.  

Quite possibly in your case, the router SSDP multicast used to discover your Sonos speakers is ‘perhaps’ sometimes not working as it should be. However I’m not certain of all the detail of your present network setup, but maybe (just for test purposes) try to ensure ‘all’ (Sonos products and controller devices) are using the same (router) wireless access point and WiFi band, if that’s practicable? You may have to split your 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz band to achieve this.

Note, that network switches (if applicable) can also have a role to play in device-discovery issues too and perhaps are not correctly forwarding the multicast packets across the LAN. Just check if any of the missing devices link back to any particular network switch and see what happens when the switch is bypassed.

See this useful link aswell (worth a quick read) re: IGMP snooping: https://community.fs.com/blog/what-is-igmp-snooping.html

It is also worth trying/fixing one of the three non-overlapping WiFi channels 1, 6 or 11 on the local router 2.4Ghz WiFi adapter, just to see if one of the channels may work better for you (but that’s assuming no Sonos products are wired to the LAN). Note too, that the SonosNet channel (when wired-mode is being used) should not be the same as the chosen router channel.

Another important area to explore is the controller device itself. Temporarily disable any security/software on the mobile controller as that can impact on discovery issues, for example, I’ve seen some users mention ‘Private Address’ (MAC Spoofing), or ‘WiFi calling’ VPN/Firewall/Antivirus software etc. which has caused some Sonos device-discovery issues… disable these features temporarily to see if that helps.

Some features built into routers can also be problematic, three that spring to mind are ‘QoS’, ‘Airtime Fairness’ and ‘Parental Control’ - I would choose to personally disable those features, if present.

I would also check for any router firmware updates or, as a last resort, maybe consider switching the router for a different brand, or model, otherwise you may just encounter the same ‘discovery’ issues from time to time, no matter what you try to do with your wired, or wireless, devices.

I’m really sorry for the lengthy post here, but maybe something mentioned above may help you to resolve the matter.

A

Thank you so much for taking the time to respond. It was due to my WiFi extender. Once disconnecting it, everything worked fine.

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