Hi @STEW_MUSIC 

Welcome to the Sonos Community! And, apologies for the delay.

Sorry to hear of this issue you are having with a slow response when changing/starting tracks.

There are two explanations - either the app is slow in instructing the speakers, or the speakers are slow in making the change.

The former would depend on your local network conditions - regardless of your internet connection speed, and regardless of how other devices behave, your Sonos system will utilise your network in ways that most of your other devices will not. The most important difference is that the speakers - and the app - all communicate locally with each other. If your router’s configuration is getting in the way of that, you may well see poor response times.

The latter would most likely depend on your DNS server - if it resolves spotify.com, for example, into an IP address slowly, then that would affect your Sonos system in the way you describe.

I first recommend that you reboot every device involved:

1. Turn off your router
2. Turn off your Sonos devices
3. Reboot your phone/tablet
4. Turn on your router
5. When WiFi returns, turn on your Sonos system and wait for all devices to boot before testing.

If that makes no difference, then I recommend you get in touch with our technical support team who have tools at their disposal that will allow them to give you advice specific to your Sonos system and what it reports - they should be able to give you more specific advice once they see reports from the speakers.

I hope this helps.

From Sonos Support:  

Here are the instructions on how to factory reset your Play:5 (Gen.1) to set it up on your Sonos S1 Controller App:

• Unplug your speaker from power, hold the mute button while you're plugging it back to power.
• Keep holding down the button until it is flashing orange & white alternating. Once you see that light, let go of the button then wait for the flashing green light.
• Once the product is flashing green, uninstall & reinstall the Sonos S1 Controller App. Open the S1 App, then select the 'Set Up New System' and then follow the prompts on the app.

Hi @STEW_MUSIC 

Please do not reset any of your speakers! Especially if they are on S1 and therefore have nothing to do with the reported issue!

I am also a disappointed customer from Sonos. Been a fan since 2014 and own a lot of speakers, even was thinking on getting some more but new app responsiveness is a shame.

I don’t believe that slow responsiveness has to do with network. Somehow before the disappointing update of the app everything worked just fine. Strange that now since app was updated it is a nightmare to connect and enjoy music through Sonos system.

what could be a real solution and not an excuse to make experience better or at least manageable?

I’m certainly not experiencing any slowness in my system, or app responsiveness. And since it doesn’t seem endemic to the software, that really leads me to a conclusion that suggests a local network issue of some type (and something I do happen to feel Sonos is more subject to than normal, as they reset their IPs more often than the average device, and streaming music is more sensitive to wifi interference than pretty much any other use of your network, including streaming video). But I can only offer suggestions. If you want data based analysis of your issues, you need to submit a system diagnostic within 10 minutes of experiencing this problem, and call Sonos Support to discuss it.

There may be information included in the diagnostic that will help Sonos pinpoint the issue and help you find a solution.

When you speak directly to the Support staff, they have tools at their disposal that will allow them to give you advice specific to your network and Sonos system.

A key point here is that it isn’t your network’s fault as such, it is the interaction of what Sonos is trying to do and how well your network supports that.

Usually both are not completely blameless, the networks could usually be better and Sonos could be less optimistic about what will be supported, speeds and connectivity.

My internet speed is up to 400 most of the time. 
I have one speaker ( early Play1 ) since the update I can rarely get the app to see the speaker. When it does it takes an age to play a song ( like 2 minutes ) if I decide to play a different song on the same album, again 2 minutes. If I turn up the volume the app turns it down again and vice versa. If I want to stop the music, I have to wait for the app to decide that’s really what I asked it to do, and then it might just decide to keep playing it anyway. Absolutely useless. I hate my Sonos now. I have a portable speaker that was a fraction of the cost that gets used instead. Total rip off. How can they leave this in such a state for so long? 

It’s the internal network that’s the issue, not the speed from your router to the outside world, or even necessarily the speed between your computer and your router.

I’d look at two things, initially. First, the  wifi interference FAQ. If the solutions provided there don’t help, I’d perform a network refresh, by unplugging/powering down all Sonos devices, then rebooting the router, before finally powering back up the Sonos. This guaranties them both a fresh version of the Sonos OS running on them, as well as a fresh IP address. 

If you continue to have delays such as you’re experiencing after that, I would recommend that you submit a system diagnostic within 10 minutes of experiencing this problem, and call Sonos Support to discuss it.

There may be information included in the diagnostic that will help Sonos pinpoint the issue and help you find a solution.

When you speak directly to the Support staff, they have tools at their disposal that will allow them to give you advice specific to your network and Sonos system.

Ok I may have been focused on problems only after months and months of infuriating frustration. 
I did the network refresh, refreshed the Sonos onto the network after updating it and after a bit of messing about it seems better and is now working ( how long for I’m not sure…) 

thank you ( I hope )

The more ‘permanent’ solution to the network refresh is setting up reserved IP addresses for the Sonos in your router, instructions in your router’s manual. But doing a network refresh may (or may not) be easier for you. Same end result. 

Same here. I’m a long time customer and own 20 speakers in two locations. They are worthless at this point.

I also suffered from a very slow and laggy system performance, to the extent that we hardly used our Sonos devices anymore. After reading the above “Best answer” I decided to check my network.

I try to use LAN instead of Wifi wherever possible to save power and for better network performance. That includes my Sonos devices and so I have disabled Wifi, but it turned out that one of four devices did not have a LAN connection and switched back to Wifi instead. Now that I fixed the device’s LAN connection and the network is again purely LAN-based everything is working quite smoothly.

Not sure, if this was a glitch or mixed wired/wireless operation has a bug.

The thing with Sonos blaming everything on the local network... I have a lot of connected devices in my home. All of the other technology vendors have managed to build products that work fine with my network. Why can't Sonos do the same? You managed to do it with the old app…

I estimate that 25% of my search queries end up with the message saying I need to check if the service is working. But it always is.

Not to mention that it will often take at least half a minute to just see what song is playing after waking up the app.

If I compare the user experience to the Netflix app on my phone, which is basically doing the same  - control streaming content to connected hardware - it's really, really poor. It has been since May and it has barely improved.

But the fact is that Sonos acts in a very different way on your network than most other devices. All within networking specs, mind you, but if your network is challenged in some way, it will likely show up on Sonos devices long before it does on others. The vast majority of devices don’t maintain three concurrent streams, to each other, to the controller, and to the Internet. Most devices merely maintain one, connecting to your computer. 

But the fact is that it worked fine before on the same network. And now it doesn't.

Not surprising, Sonos changed a lot of things under the hood.

I’m sure the plan was to improve things, and it is likely they have for a majority of users.

Not sure why you think it has improved for the majority of users.

All the news articles, reviews in the app store and topics here have me believing the opposite. And Sonos promised to improve reliability. I'm still waiting.

I'm thankful for all the functionality Sonos has reintroduced to the app since May but the new app is still way behind on the old app in terms of functionality and reliability. And with comments such as "reset your modem" it makes me think the reliability won't improve any time soon...

I guess it’s easier to blame someone else than take responsibility for your own system. Certainly Sonos made the client devices, they should have control over the local network as well. It’s truly unfortunate that they don’t control the network that they attach to, and don’t the abilities that users do, as an administrator. 

They made a big mistake in over hauling the ui and firmware all at once. Even if things have improved for the majority (I have no idea if this is true or not) if things are not better for 10% of owners that’s a huge number of people.
 

Sonos admit they still haven’t fixed control issues for some users,  blaming users and claiming it’s working well from the resident superusers is pathetic. 

Moderator Note: Modified in accordance with the Community Code of Conduct.

My Sonos was working fine and an update was forced upon me. Of course I'm going to blame the vendor.

If it was working fine on every other network I'd consider it to be an error in my network. But a lot of people are experiencing these problems. Why are you attacking people that have a bad user experience? What do you have to gain from that?

That is absolutely not what I’m doing. I am asking why there are those who think the only answer is ‘Sonos’, without taking steps to ensure that it isn’t something else. I live in a world in which proof is required, not merely accusations, especially if no effort is attempted to confirm. 

Like I explained in my earlier posts, the problem only exists with the new Sonos app and not with any other device on my network nor with the old Sonos app. I've taken plenty of steps to pinpoint the problem. Why do you require proof of my issue with Sonos? You're not a party in this conflict. You're just a bystander taking sides.

Might be someone who is trying to make an effort to assist you in solving your problem?