Does your Play:5 still work?

Sounds like you got a support person who was on drugs.

My P100 vintage P5s are doing just fine thanks.

Even the senior tech staff said the same thing apparently, that there is most likely a hardware fault in all three of my Play:5s due to:

“I can see that there are synchronization issues where the PCM data is buffered into the speaker to feed into the mixer and Amplifier Stage. There should not be any issue like this when a speaker is wired via ethernet cable to the main router because in this setup we are sure that the necessary data reaches the speaker without any interferences.” 

@controlav thanks for reporting that your players are running fine. I guess I have to test out some other streaming services or LAN based playback to see if the problem still exists. 

@controlav Out of curiosity, what firmware version are you running on your Play:5s? 

There must be thousands of people still using gen1 Play:5s. I agree with @controlav that the advice given to you by Sonos Support seems extraordinary. Whatever the cause of your problem I cannot believe you need to replace the speakers 

57.13-34149 which is the latest S1 available for it.

Actually, that is kind of weird, since I’m running Version: 11.6.1 (build 571334140) but no updates are available. 

Also weird way to present the version, since that seems to be the build number. 

Sorry typo in the last digit, I’m running 34140 not 34149. This is the softwareVersion from the device xml file.

Actually I made a new observation here. It seems the Play:5s actually plays without any drops if they actually plays as slaves to another zone (which isn’t a Play:5). When grouped with a Play:1 (and the Play:1 is coordinator), it seems to not sweat it at all. 

If I play it standalone (from Spotify) it is silenced a few seconds every 5-20 minutes or so. That kind of mitigates the claim the support person had that it was a hardware fault with the DAC (or whatever the claim was). I was hoping that the update (11.7) actually contained a fix for this, but apparently not. 

I guess I need to then validate if it is only Spotify playback that is problematic. 

Playing Sonos Radio seems to be fine, no dropouts whatsoever, so the Spotify streaming is seemingly broken on the Play:5s? 

Am I really the only one seeing this problem? 😅

Even though other music services are playing fine, I would still perhaps look a little deeper into the network setup here and try to optimise things to reduce interference, such as trying the usual three different non-overlapping WiFi channels (channel 1, 6 or 11) for the local routers 2.4ghz band and set the chosen channel-width to 20Mhz. If that doesn’t solve the issue then try running the setup in wired SonosNet mode as mentioned in these links:

https://support.sonos.com/en-us/article/choose-between-a-wireless-and-wired-sonos-setup

https://support.sonos.com/en-us/article/switch-sonos-between-a-wireless-and-wired-setup

Note: keep any wired device at least one metre from the router or other access point. Set the SonosNet channel in the Sonos App network settings so it is different to the chosen router channel mentioned earlier. If grouping your speakers together try setting up the group starting with the wired device too as the group co-ordinator.

These things are always worth doing anyway and just see if it helps to stop the audio dropouts.