Hi @nick.sturrock, welcome to the Sonos Community!
I’m sorry to hear that you’re having volume issues with your system. What you’re describing sounds like voice assistant ducking, except the part where using the Sonos app also changes the volume when starting a new track.
When you give a voice command from an Alexa device to Sonos, all Sonos devices that are playing will ‘duck’, lowering their volume so the voice command can be heard, which is expected behaviour. This doesn’t explain why the system ducks when you initiate playback from the Sonos app however and I don’t see anything in our system explaining why.
Since it seems you can replicate this issue, I’d recommend submitting a diagnostics within ten minutes of the volume dip occurring then contacting our support team for further assistance. They have the tools available to look into your system and see why the volume is lowering when you select a new track.
I hope this helps!
Thanks for the response, will submit a diagnostic shortly.
Will also verify that this occurs without the Alexa device either connected or plugged in, just to check that it's not somehow at fault for triggering the ducking when a new track is manually selected.
Submitted diagnostic *********. This exhibited not only volume drops but also complete drop outs shortly afterwards, which I don't normally experience.
Moderator edit: Diagnostic number recorded and removed
Have now had a support session on Live chat and got some help rebooting everything whout having to go up a ladder and unplug the Ones, which are mounted 3m above floor level.
Having rebooted all affected components and rebuilt the group I noticed from being on the floor and right next to it that actually the only speaker that exhibits this issue is the Sub Gen 3, which starts playing for 1-2 seconds and then drops out completely for betweeen 5-25 seconds.
So I think it is the effect of the Sub drop out that makes the overall group volume appear lower by approximately 50% - I guess this should still show up in the diagnostic, but as soon as the Sub is removed from the system then the playback works as expected. Having discovered this I see other people reporting the same thing e.g.
So will search for further advice based on these, but the ‘accepted answer’ on that topic above that it might be a duplicate IP address seems unlikely to say the least but can check this easily enough and don’t see any such problem in router. Also above topic is closed so can’t ask contributor if they ever managed to resolve this issue.
Factory resetting the Sub and re-joining it to the system has had no impact. After every track start / new stream it starts playing then cust out then actually cuts back in and drops out again before settling down. Definitely seems like a networking / software issue on the device, like the handshake doesn’t succeed first time around when starting a new stream.
