Sonos Play 5 Stereo Pair Line-In Problem

@ratty - Good Idea.  I wasn’t having and issues with 75ms with the Five’s (as they are only 3 feet apart).  That said, I picked up a One today for my office, and that would blip when playing from the turntable. Changed delay to Medium (113ms) and that resolved that issue.  Want to keep it as low as possible, but may have to bump it to 150ms as I add more devices.

Question about that.  Does each speaker act as a repeater when using SonosNet, or do they all have to connect back to whichever speaker has the physical hardwire?

It rather depends. The stream clearly originates from the unit hosting the Line-In, but as for how it gets distributed there are several factors in play.

SonosNet is a Layer 2 mesh, where any node can talk to its peers. So, yes, they can be thought of as repeaters.

However the active Layer 2 topology is determined by STP (Spanning Tree Protocol), which in practice means that SonosNet will try and minimise the number of wireless hops back to the wired network. But overlaid on that is the Direct Routing topology which shortcuts the spanning tree topology for the stream within a group (or stereo pair, a special kind of group).

Then there’s Layer 3 (IP), where a group will try to use multicast if it can, unless the underlying network obstructs this in which case it could resort to multiple unicasts...

It would perhaps be illuminating to review your network matrix, which will at least reveal the SonosNet spanning tree topology. Go to http://x.x.x.x:1400/support/review where x.x.x.x is the IP of any player. Click on Network Matrix to expand it, and post a screenshot. 

Very Cool!  I like that the network map is built in!  Turntable is connected to “Bedroom (L)”

Okay, a relatively simple situation, which seems to be happy. Good signal strengths, with the Line-In into the root node. The latest models can’t display ambient RF noise data in the left column of the matrix, due to compatibility issues, hence the white cells there. Interference is therefore a bit of an unknown quantity. A burst could have accounted for the ‘blips’ in the Office, before the buffering was tweaked up. 

As a tip, if you plan to group Bedroom with Office then start with Bedroom and add Office, not the other way round. It will help optimise the wireless network paths. The first room in a group (and usually the left node thereof if a pair) fetches the stream and sends it to the other members. 

@ratty Thank you!