Sonos Play 3 no longer supported?

To be honest I'm not sure if Sonos decision to support such old devices as Play1 and Play3 on S2 was a good one. Their intention was to make as many users as possible happy when S2 was introduced. But with ongoing time and many updates S2 was becoming more and more complex, so hardware of the old devices came to its limits. To be fair I think you have to accept that a Play3 can't stand it any longer and has to be replaced, if you still want to get full S2 performance. That's the way like most technical devices get to their end of life point these days. Just remember how long the Play3 has been supported… not many other similar products do or did. 

If you like to use your P3 stereo pair in a performant way, I suggest to downgrade it to S1 what imo will increase performance a lot.

This has been known to yield uninterrupted stability in one case reported here. Downside of course is a split system, unless the rest of the units can also be rolled back.

Yes, without any compromise things won’t get better. 😉 But it’s an alternative to a replacement and you can use the „oldtimers“ in a satisfying way. 

Thank you for the replies. I really don’t want to split the system to S1 and S2 - it’ll mean the Move 2 in the ensuite cannot be grouped with the bedroom, and this group is the most-used in our house.

Can’t easily replace the Play 3s either because they’re installed in custom made furniture.  

Damn.

Maybe fitting passive speakers and a Sonos Amp could be an alternative. 

If Sonos really does not solve this, and so in fact ends support for older speakers on S2, I would expect them to at least be open about this. According to Sonos’s pinned reaction in the thread linked below this still is a bug however:
 

I surely hope Sonos solves this. My Connect (gen 2) also suffers from this.

What baffles me is why Sonos support went through many hours of talking about and diagnosing network stuff. Why does nobody in support say, "audio dropouts on a play3, yes this is a memory issue caused by a firmware change.".

What a waste of my time and theirs.

It is very strange. It is like they don’t want you to come to the end point you have, of finding out what really ails your units, which is a Sonos screw up that they are being tardy about admitting, let alone fixing.

A lot of ill will to Sonos is being generated by this ham handed behaviour up and down the Sonos organisation.

It is quite like the approach taken by some user members here in the Sonos forcing people thread, in the first two pages of that thread. Although in that case I am sure they too were just as clueless as the OP there, and had no intent to misguide.

This morning I split my system into S1 and S2. I downgraded the Play:3 stereo pair to S1 leaving my Amp and Roam on S2. The difference is night and day. S1 with the Play:3 stereo is as rapid as it should be and S2 is fine with the Roam and Amp. Luckily Spotify connect on PC does not care if the products are S1 or S2 and I can still play to all from PC with Spotify Connect. S1 uses SonosNet on Ch1 and S2 uses SonosNet on Ch11. Grouping loss isn’t really a concern as I rarely grouped the office stereo pair with the Amp or Roam.

Unfortunately that isn’t an option for me at the moment because we keep our bedroom Play3 stereo pair grouped with the Move 2 in our ensuite bathroom.  If I downgrade the Play3s to S1 it will be impossible to group. :(