Headliner II

Does your Play:5 still work?

14 replies
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I have been troubleshooting dropouts on my Play:5s the whole day, and even hard-wired they still dropout playing Spotify.

Support is now saying that “They have reached their capacity, please use the upgrade program to purchase new speakers” which is kind of ****.

Is anyone else having similar problems? This problem only affects the P100 series speakers, not my newer ones (Play:3, Play:1 which are A100).

Replacing my 3 Play:5s with 3 Fives would be like €2000. I wasn’t expecting Sonos to deal with such planned obsolence.

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J

jishiAuthor

Headliner II

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.

Ken_Griffiths

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).

S

SumoIrl

Lyricist III

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? 😅

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…..

S

soth

Lyricist I

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

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