Sonos has become really unstable over the last month or two

Sorry you’ve had so much difficulty. Sounds a lot like a duplicate IP address issue, caused by confusion in your router, but I’m just guessing. 

Sonos is consistently unstable. I will lose access, run the diagnostics, turn the speakers on and off, turn the router on and off, follow the app prompts. It will fail, then inexplicably and hour or two later it will start working.
Then when it’s working, you go to turn it off, and the app will fail again.
I am no technical numpty, I have checked my router tables, removed devices, looked at the DHCP leases, you name it.
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The thing is, Sonos… is your customers don’t give a toss about what the problems are. We don’t care if it is our network settings or not. All we bought was some speakers, that we want to turn on and play music. That’s it.

Remember the good old days? You bought a stereo, put on what you wanted to play, and turned it on.

You didn’t have to jump through 7 circles of hell just to play some music on the device you invested your hard earned cash into.

You have lost sight of that, and I am looking at any and all opportunities to get your products out of my life.

 

You purchased a speaker that is a network device. It will only ever be as good as the network it is connected to. Sonos, most unfortunately, has no control over your network. It relies on a stable connection to work.

It is unfortunate that you’re unable to provide such a clean connection. I’d encourage you to get rid of this network system that is causing you frustration, and perhaps fall back to older tech, that doesn’t have such demands. 

Hi @Putney I’m sure there are plenty of folk on the community boards here that have sorted their network and are looking to expand their product ownership - me included. Here’s a suggested opportunity for you: offer them up for free collection - or even post them. That’ll get them out of your life. 

I think some of the comments are missing the point. You have several technically savvy people here saying that their networks work very well for every application they have, except for Sonos. I can simultaneously run lots of simultaneous 4K streams, video conference, etc, and all of these applications run perfectly fine, all of the time. But, when I have nothing except Sonos traffic (I do understand shared mediums), it’s hypersensitive and doesn’t work, often enough to be a problem. That’s a problem that Sonos might want to consider addressing. Not to mention that the app is, although getting better, not exactly world-class (I still use it most of the time, but I know people who absolutely hate it and rely exclusively on airplay from Spotify/Apple Music).

The point is that lots of other stuff works just fine; I get that syncing audio is not simple, but it’s not crazy difficult either, I’ve been involved in developing the underlying wifi technology for these types of applications, but some of the problems I’m having are a function of questionable system design creating an overly fragile system. I love Sonos, I don’t want to get rid of mine, but I sure would like it to work better before I consider spending any more money on it. 

99% of networks work fine. There are some routers that are sub par in creating an efficient and intelligent network, those may need a little massaging in order to help Sonos work. 

None of the efforts are super challenging, nor are they terribly technical, as they can be done by the average person. 

It’s perhaps unfortunate that Sonos chose to make their special computer/speakers work off of a WiFi network, rather than requiring them to be directly wired with Ethernet, but some of the issues that we go on about are network, and not simply WiFi issues. The simple fact is that carrying data from one place to another using someone else’s protocols can be challenging. The ‘old’ style direct cable carrying simple voltage modulation was much easier. 

And yet, everything else works just fine.

You own a connect amp. Is it a Gen 2/S2 compatible ? If so might be this:

 

How many other devices are there on your network which must maintain perfect sync between up to 32 devices by communicating back and forth thousands of times a second?

As @jgatie states, Sonos certainly uses a network in ways that most other devices do not.