Seems odd to me, I’ve never heard of such a thing, and am not sure how it would impact playback. Sure, the ROM should be almost full, that’s one of the big reasons Sonos went to S2, and wouldn’t allow devices with smaller amounts of ROM to be upgraded.

My suspicion is your friend is having network issues, not ROM issues. 

Well it is a rather old speaker and as this chart shows it may have a lot less memory than most newer Sonos devices…

The device memory is one of the reasons for Sonos moving over to the newer S2 system, but that said, Sonos have gone on record saying they will do their best to keep the old devices running with their existing services, but I guess there will come a day when your friend might want to consider an upgrade and use the Sonos trade-up scheme, perhaps?

I think the Play:5 (gen1) was first launched 2009 - so in computerised-device terms, its lasted well. In fact I gave two original Play:5’s to my Son some years ago, around the time of the S1/S2 split and those are still going strong aswell.

As for audio-dropouts however, I would just ensure the speaker gets a decent wireless or wired connection and all being well with it's hardware it should play fine, but maybe it’s memory chip perhaps has one or two issues in its old age.

Many folk in the community here, recommend using the Sonos devices in SonosNet mode, usually/only if there is more than one Sonos device that is, (that just means wiring one Sonos product direct to the router) but placed at least one metre away from its WiFi AP and running alongside a routers fixed 2.4Ghz Wifi channel 1,6 or 11, with a channel-width of 20Mhz only and then set the SonosNet channel so it’s at least 5 channels away from the chosen router channel… but…

If there’s only the one speaker in your friends system, then run it wired, or on the mentioned fixed WiFi signal with the 20Mhz channel width, as that will help keep interference to a minimum.

Not much anyone can do though if it’s hardware is old and starting to struggle.

Hi

Thanks for the replies.

I’m not trying to troubleshoot or anything like that. It’s the statement from the technichan that bothers me because if the ROM is full and he also said that it gets full from all connection to other devices, then ALL Gen 1 Play 5 ROM’s would be full all around the world. I mean the ROM cannot contain other device info because then a factory reset would never work. And if the ROM is almost full would cause dropout, then all of the play 5 Gen 1 around the globe would have the exakt same issue because I think the ROM looks 100% same for all devices in the same productline!

Without seeing the actual conversation, in context, which was presumably also told to you by your friend, we can only guess at what the staff member was perhaps referring to here.

They might have been referring to some ram sectors being marked as bad by the OS on the speaker, arising perhaps from its old age, or merely commenting that its ROM had been pushed to its limitation, which is true, as Sonos have openly removed some features from S1 to help keep their older speakers running on the legacy S1 system, including things like removing CR100/200 and controller direct access via sonosnet, S2 device downgrading etc and of course not adding any new features during the past few years.