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I have a handful of older play3s and play1s that I wasn’t using, so I decided to give them to a friend. To get them ready, I tried to connect them to my system so I could update them, then factory reset them for my friend.

 

Adding the speakers to my system was a nightmare. When the app told me to listen for chimes after connecting my phone to the speaker’s temp wifi, none of the speakers played the tones(are they too old to download the mp3?).

 

I got around this by temporarily wiring in the speakers (though the app still failed to see them when prompted to press buttons on the speakers) when I removed the cable part-way through the setup, they finally added.

 

I updated the speakers to my system and verified they worked by playing some music. Then I factory reset them and took them to my friend’s house. There I ran into the same issue with the speakers not playing chimes during setup of a new household. The problem was my friend’s router doesn’t have ethernet (most don’t these days).

 

Is it simply not possible to add gen1 play3s and play1s to systems anymore? I had a ton of experience troubleshooting Sonos systems and got it working, but there’s no way my friend could have done so.

 

tldr: Can you add gen1 play3s and play1s to systems without tricking your router using ethernet cables?

They’re relatively old (design and manufacture) devices, but they’re supposed to generate their own ‘network’ that you can connect to during setup. They were designed and made before BLE was a ‘thing’, and don’t have the electronics inside them to do that. 

It’s possible, somewhere along the line, that the firmware running on them got borked, and they don’t generate that signal properly, I don’t know. Or that someone mistakenly turned off the WiFi on them (a feature I don’t think was possible when they were released, but my memory is fuzzy on that).  I have always found that system to be problematic, and as a result, have always, when factory resetting them, connected them with an Ethernet cable. Safer, IMHO, to do so.

I’ve seen some posts recently from a Sonos rep that suggests (I think) that there’s been an underlying change to the firmware, and once you’ve done the reset process with the cable, you shouldn’t be needing to do it that way again, but I’ve not tested my interpretation of that statement, I just don’t have a need to reset those speakers at this point. 

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