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. 

This has already been done, I played it wired directly to the router and submitted a diagnostic to Sonos support, they claimed it was a hardware error (claiming there was some timing error, DAC related?) but I’m having a hard time believing that when all three players is showing the same symptoms, and now these findings. 

I gave two Play:5 (gen1’s) to my son and his family a few years ago now and they mostly use Spotify too and last time I spoke to him, his speakers were playing okay, both from the S1 and Spotify Apps. I know the speakers were first released by Sonos in 2009 and think those particular two were manufactured around 2013/14 (approx.) and I gave them to him in 2019. He has them in his Kitchen/Diner and so they’re still going strong, but guess product lifespan will always vary.

He also has a new Sonos ‘Five’ and 4 old Play:1’s running on S2 aswell and those Play:1’s are from the 2014-16 period and those are still playing okay too, 

I did have another Play:5 (gen1) fail on me in 2016, or thereabouts, and that was a ‘bad firmware/dry joint issue’ (it would not factory reset and it kept rebooting when it had been playing for some hours and had got warm) it was then just outside it’s two year guarantee period and so I paid Sonos £100 (or thereabouts) to exchange it for a refurbished Play:5. I gave that speaker to my son-in-laws Dad (I purchased a Five as a replacement, as I had begun to switchover my setup to S2) and that old Play:5 is still working too as far as I’m aware (the Dad uses Amazon Prime as his MSP though, I believe).

No I’m seeing exactly the same issue. Just as you describe, radio is fine, it’s just spotify. This makes it very hard for me to accept it’s a wifi issue, it’s definitely like the speaker is buffering under the load of large streaming data - the pause is consistent every time at around 8 seconds. Only affects one speaker, the other one continues to play. If it’s wifi interference I would expect both to drop and also for the interruptions to be of random length. 

Also, my workaround is to use a Play 1 as a slave player, directing Spotify to it first and then adding my Play 5’s in a group. 

To be honest I’m happy with this if it continues to work. Wasn’t that appetising to think about replacing 2 x Play 5’s…..

I have the same problem. Sporadic dropouts and only on the play 5. Started maybe a  year ago.