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My system is experiencing speaker dropout increasingly often. A year or two ago it happened once in a blue moon. It was so bad the other day that I did a diagnostic while it was occurring: 2031394178. I know it is preferable to call in to support, but the last time I was on hold too long and gave up.

I play my system in party mode with all speakers grouped in general, and increasingly, I am experiencing extremely frustrating speaker dropouts. I’ll be in a room and the music has been playing fine and then the speaker in the room and adjacent rooms stop playing while I can still hear it in other rooms in the house. Minutes will pass and then one speaker comes back on, then another, and they’re all back...for a while and then the cycle repeats soon or eventually.

I have 12 speakers and 3 are wired. I haven’t measured but I would guess that no speaker is more than 25 feet (horizontally or vertically) from the next; I would think that would make for a solid mesh network. I do have a mix of multiple generations of speakers, some of which (PLAY:1s) are quite old; not sure if that is an issue. I recently added 2 ERA 100 speakers in hopes of improving the issue by improving the mesh coverage. No soap.

I have taken a look at the network matrix and am rather surprised that it is not full of green squares; I basically have a speaker in every room and I can’t understand how the coverage is not more solid. 

 

Second Floor

  • PLAY:1 Master Bedroom (5/2/2016)
  • PLAY:1 Office (4/10/2018) *wired*
  • ONE SL Eve (11/19/2020)
  • ERA 100 Grace (3/30/2023) *wired*

First Floor

  • PLAY:1 Dining Room (4/11/2018)
  • ONE SL pair Family Room (12/2/2019)
  • ONE SL Kitchen (12/20/2019)
  • ERA 100 Living Room (3/30/2023) *wired*

Basement

  • PLAY:1 Gym (11/25/2016)
  • PLAY:1 Workshop (11/27/2016)

Free Range, generally on First Floor

  • ROAM (8/14/2021)

Generally, it seems that the Kitchen, Family Room, Dining Room, Gym and Workshop are the problematic speakers. But I’m not sure; it could just be that I am present in those areas when I notice the problem.

I make it a point to start the music on one of the wired speakers, generally the Office, and then group the other speakers into it. I do this because in another question I’ve asked about problems with album covers not displaying in the app, it was suggested that starting the music on a wired speaker could be part of the problem.

 

 

Hi @Johnny Rico 

Thanks for your post!

You are following good advice to keep the Office speaker as the one to be in charge of the group (Group Coordinator) because, as a wired unit, it is the best situated to be distributing the audio feed to other players. Looking at the Office speaker, however, I did notice a rather extreme amount of multicast flooding erroneously arriving at it’s network interface. All this extra traffic that isn’t actually intended for your Sonos system is sucking up the bandwidth available to the speaker, and needs to be blocked.

If your router has the option to enable IGMP Snooping/Filtering, please enable it and reboot your router afterwards. If there is no option, however, I recommend you purchase a IGMP-capable network switch (which shouldn’t cost more than about £$€40) and fit it to go between your router and your Office speaker.

It also looks like there might be some other WiFi capable devices near your Office speaker - considering it’s an office, this is not surprising. Please keep other WiFi devices at least 1m away from the Office speaker - in an office, some prime examples would be cordless telephone bases, printers, laptops, etc. I can see a significant transmission failure rate between the Office speaker and the rest of your Sonos system, and reducing interference should go some way in resolving this.

If you can take care of the interference and the multicast flooding, you’ll be well on your way to getting things working as you expect them to. Please feel free to submit a support diagnostic after taking these steps to confirm an improvement, though it should be easily noticeable if you do.

I hope this helps.

Thanks @Corry P, that is really helpful info. I have never heard of multicast flooding and the IGMP Snooping/Filtering setting. I checked, and my router does have that setting, so I will be changing it and hoping to see some improvement. WiFi interference will be a little more challenging, as I have something plugged into almost every ethernet jack in the various rooms. But, I’ll see what I can rearrange. I’ll do another diagnostic after I make these tweaks and post the code here 👍

Hi again @Corry P , I have made that router tweak + reboot and also made some speaker placement changes. It turns out that I had multiple speakers pretty close to other wireless devices. This weekend my playlists ran great without any dropouts. Album art display in the Android app, which had been problematic, seemed solid as well. Today I ran a diagnostic while playing and the number is: 870628076. If you could take a look at this “after” diagnostic and verify that it looks better compared to the previous “before” diagnostic, I’d appreciate it. There’s no urgency; whenever you have time. Thanks again!

Hi @Johnny Rico 

I’m glad to hear things have improved!

The multicast flooding has capital-G Gone, and the interference has been significantly reduced too (it never really goes away). Well done!

Excellent, thank you again @Corry P !

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