multiroom system is pants.

But the bandwidth used is tiny so cases where that makes a difference are rare.

Much rarer than folks having two good channels to use.

Anyway I've told you what is recommended so I'll leave it at that.

I don’t really understand the “bandwidth is tiny” argument.

When a track starts playing from scratch on a dozen-unit system like the OP’s, the first thing that has to happen before any music can start playing is that the first buffer’s worth of audio data has to get to all twelve devices. I don’t understand any case that says that this data is “tiny”. You need twelve copies of that data to traverse the network, and you will have silence until that’s done.

If you make it so that (say) a quarter of that traffic goes over hardwired connections, that frees up bandwidth for the remaining nine devices to get their data quicker via wireless connections.

Have you looked at the data requirements for various audio streaming formats?

FLAC / CD quality is only about 1500 Kbps.

My old Raspberry Pi is happy to stream at least four FLAC streams while showing very low CPU use so minimal load.

My not fancy Wi-Fi does 400 down, 250 up to my tablet I'm posting from and that is in Mbps not K.

Sonosnet is limited to under 100 Mbps by the Ethernet ports, the older tech Wi-Fi it uses is also fairly slow. I didn't see any gain here in wiring multiple Sonos or adding a Boost device. I do still have several wired Sonos here, I was ready to unwire and move to Ethernet after wor,ing with support but the new app mess hit so I'm holding off for now but it will get done once things are a bit more stable.

Thanks for the info, I’ll try wiring q or 2 others , however this goes against the wireless system principle on which Sonos prides and sells itself. Just embarrassing when you have people round playing music and all,of a sudden your great system just doesn’t perform. 

Hmmm… perhaps you are right about the data requirements. I’ve just checked some file sizes - a random example here is a 6-minute track, FLAC encoded which is 40MB in size, give or take.

I suspect that neither of us know the buffer size that Sonos use but if we say that they take a 30s buffer, that’s ~4MB with network overhead. For twelve units that’s 50MB, which is 400Mb. We can’t know how much contention there is on the wireless network, but in theory that should only take a few seconds before the music can start playing - even via Sonosnet.

But… the thing is that it doesn’t accord with my own experience on my network. Before I changed mine to have four wired network connections, I was getting significant delays when jumping tracks - maybe ten seconds before things sorted themselves out. Now that I have the additional hardwired connections, I typically get (just) sub-second delays with FLAC content.

Perhaps there is something unusual about my network, but it’s hard to think why it should have a problem but still deliver the improvements I am seeing when hardwired.

I’ve never been able to escape the suspicion that a large part of the problem with playback delays and stuttering is more to do with the way in which Sonos attempts to synchronise playback than raw bandwidth, but that’s not something that is provable, given that Sonos don’t publish how they achieve synchronisation, as far as I’m aware.

Are you playing hi-res content? If you have the option of lower resolution (i.e. smaller data = lower bandwidth requirement) then it might be worth trying that. I notice very little delays when playing lower-res content (and to be honest, most of the time I’m not listening carefully enough to notice the difference in sound quality).