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Speakers unable to connect to Plex when connected to one specific Unifi AP

  • 10 January 2024
  • 6 replies
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H

I have 7 Sonos speakers, a mixture of Play:3, Five, Era 300 and a Roam. I use Plex and play the majority of my music from that source. The problem I have is that when any of my speakers connect to a particular Unifi AP they are unable to connect to Plex and playback fails. If a speaker is part of the way through a queue when connected to one of my other Unifi APs and I force it to reconnect to the problematic AP then playback will fail on the next track. No other music services are affected and the same tracks played directly from my Sonos Library from a fileshare on my network play fine even when connected to the problem AP and this is the same share behind my Plex library. Network tests on the AP and the speaker(s) when connected to the AP show no problems i.e. name resolution is fine and connection to the gateway and internet are fine with no packet loss and no other wireless clients experience any connectivity issues. In the case of my 2 downstairs Five speakers this is the nearest AP and has the best 5GHz signal, my network is exclusively 5GHz (80MHz) and has been tweaked to ensure the channels have no competing signals.

I suspect that this is a problem for Unifi to look into but I’d like to get some diagnostic info from the speakers if possible as I’ve not seen anything useful from the logs on the AP and config is the same across my APs albeit different models and WiFi channels.

Thanks

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Best answer by hopkins35 17 January 2024, 09:15

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6 replies

buzz

then playback will fail on the next track.

When possible the players will cache the whole track. This is a plus if there is a connectivity issue because the system has a lot of time to work through the issue. It’s a disadvantage while troubleshooting because it’s hard to pin down exactly when the issue started.

Are any of the players wired to the network?

I suggest that you submit a diagnostic, note the confirmation number and contact SONOS phone support. Network issues eave tracks in the diagnostic. You can post the confirmation here, but there is no guarantee if or when a staff member will stop by or comment.

buzz

This does not exactly fit your symptoms, but check to make sure that access point isolation has not been set on the problem access point. Here is a brief discussion.

Stanley_4
Userlevel 7
Badge +22

If you are using individual configurations for your APs you might want to verify the problem one’s settings exactly match a working one’s settings.

H

then playback will fail on the next track.

Are any of the players wired to the network?

I recently moved to an all wireless setup in an attempt to cure this problem, I previously had all but two speakers connected to ethernet but ditched it in favour of all wireless as I suspected interference on Sonosnet’s 2.4GHz band but the problem persists on my 5GHz with excellent coverage and no competing networks

H

If you are using individual configurations for your APs you might want to verify the problem one’s settings exactly match a working one’s settings.

No custom settings per AP apart from channel differences and transmit power which have been tweaked in all corners of my house to ensure full coverage with just enough overlap in AP signals to ensure fast roaming works correctly.

And @buzz no, there’s no client isolation on my main WiFi SSID, only on my guest or IOT networks and I never managed to get Sonos to play nicely across different subnets

H

After a long support call with Sonos it looks like the problem is finally fixed but it’s a bit of a puzzler. I needed to turn off the UniFi Multicast Enhancement functionality. What’s odd about this is that across numerous articles describing best practice when using Sonos with UniFi gear, they all say to turn it on but to turn off Multicast and Broadcast Control and Proxy ARP, which were off on my system, the other mystery is why multicast enhancement being on only affected one out of four of my APs but at least I’ve had no playback issues since.

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