Sonos Sub 3 stopped working on WiFi

Can i just check one thing? On the wired Arc it still has WiFi enabled? You haven't ticked 'Disable WiFi' in the Arc settings?

@John B - I have ticked 'Disable WiFi' but only on the Arc.

I thought it only applied to the Arc, that's why I did it.

EDIT: I have also disabled WiFi on my Sub and now my 2 SL's are showing as WM:1

I don't really understand what's going on but it's all sorted now!

Disabling WIFI on the Arc shuts down the 5 GHz private connection to the Sub.  You need to have WiFi turned on for the Arc in order for it to connect to the Sub. 

If you still have anything set to ‘Disable Wifi’ you have not got it properly sorted.  Please confirm what is currently wired and what has ‘Disable WiFi’ checked.

The Arc should be wired.  The surrounds and Sub should not be wired.  All devices should be set to ‘Enable WiFi’, including the wired Arc.  All devices should show WM=0 in About My System.

Doh, that's why as I forgot that the Sub uses 5 Ghz band!

If the Arc was originally set with ‘Disable WiFi’ the only way a wireless Sub could connect would be via the home WiFi. This would give the impression of being online but the Sub audio could routinely falter due to the excessive latency on the roundabout trip from Arc to Sub causing buffer underflow.

As already noted the Sub has to have a wireless direct connection to the Arc’s own 5GHz radio. Or the Sub can be wired if the Arc is wired.

The above would also apply for the surrounds.

No, you’re fine. So long as the Arc’s ‘WiFi’ is enabled the surrounds can talk to it.

Just to say chaps, you really know your technical stuff.

For the record, I have gone back to a wired connection for the Arc only.

I didn't realise for a number of hours that the Sub wasn't working after disabling the 5 GHz band lol

As you can probably guess I am not technically minded and what I like about this forum is no one takes the mickey!

OK.  Your confusion is mostly because you are not distinguishing between WiFi (the wireless connection created by your router) and ‘wireless’ (which also includes SonosNet and direct device-to-device communication).  To be fair, the Sonos app is unhelpfully lax in its use of these terms.

As soon as you wire just one Sonos device the whole Sonos system connects wireless devices using SonosNet, NOT WiFi.  The WM=0 indicates that the device is connected by Ethernet or wirelessly using SonosNet.

Actually, that isn’t quite correct for surrounds and Sub in a HT system.  These connect to the main HT device (e.g. Arc) via direct routing over 5GHz (NOT your router’s 5GHz Wifi).  At least they will do if their radios aren’t disabled, which is what you inadvertently did.

If you still have the Arc wired but with its radio disabled, and the surrounds are connected via your WiFi (WM=1) this is going to give you latency in the surrounds and they are very unlikely to operate in a stable and reliable way.

It is incredibly unhelpful that the app uses the terms ‘Enable / Disable Wifi’ for something that actually disables SonosNet.

When people come on here seeking understanding and help, there are lots of people happy to help.  It’s when users come on with ‘Sonos is a useless system and the company is run by imbeciles’ that politeness may go out the window (at least in my case!)

I have my setup exactly as you stated above.

I am not touching the settings any more lol

I think it was @ratty who once suggested something along the lines of, that switching off WiFi on a Home Theatre master product, when it’s bonded surrounds or sub are uncabled and connected over WiFi, should perhaps just disable its 2.4Ghz adapter only, leaving the 5Ghz adapter available to still do its job… I think that’s a really good suggestion and would certainly have stopped the problems seen by the OP in this thread. 

Sorry to bring this thread back to life but I had to comment after reading your comment about latency as I also noticed occasionally that my surround speakers were producing sound a fraction of a second behind what the Arc produced.

Now I know why!

I also agree with you that Sonos's description of WiFi is somewhat misleading as apparently it is referring to SonosNet which is why I disabled the option on the Arc in the first place!

Cheers 🍻 

I have only had Sonos products for a number of months and I have found the sound quality excellent and I have no problem with trying to resolve the occasional problem encountered usually caused by me lol