Question

Advice on hard wiring some Sonos speakers

  • 9 November 2020
  • 1 reply
  • 251 views
J

Hi All

My setup is as follows: 1x Playbar in the lounge, 2 x Sonos Play One speakers in the kitchen and 2 x Sonos Play One speakers on the patio. All Sonos products connect wirelessly over Sonos Net and I have a Boost plugged directly into the wifi router (which is at least one meter away from the wifi router). My wifi router’s 2.4Ghz channel runs on channel 11 and my Sonos Net on channel 6. The wifi router is in my lounge. I have assigned all my Sonos products static IP’s. I run a 100/10 fibre line. 

After doing all of this, my system still has lag and I experience drop outs. The speakers with poor connection are one in the kitchen and one on the patio. I cannot move these speakers and I cannot move my Boost nor my wifi router. The only problem can be the brick walls/structure of the house (none of which I can change).

I am now going to hardwire all my Play On speakers (ie 2 x Sonos Play One speakers in the kitchen and 2 x Sonos Play One speakers on the patio) I can not hardwire my Playbar. I plan on running LAN cables from each speaker into an unmanaged switch and plug the switch directly into my router. I will keep the Boost plugged into the wifi-router, as it currently is.

 

Does anyone foresee any problems with this setup?/ does anyone have any other advice for me before I embark on this exercise? Any confirmations/suggestions/criticism would be very much appreciated!

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1 reply

Airgetlam

The one thing I’d recommend is a network refresh before embarking on this task. As you say, you can’t rebuild the walls of your home, but you can rebuild the network signal the Sonos are connecting to. And it’s possible that some of the issues you’re experiencing are due to network problems that might be easier to fix. Note my careful use of caveats...without hard data, it’s hard to ‘know’ based on just an explanation, but the effort involved in a test fix is low, so I’d consider it worthwhile. And if it fixes some issues, they would have been occurring even when you wired, as the issue is router based, and not WiFi or cabling based.

So, first unplug all Sonos devices from power. This includes the BOOST. Then, while they are unplugged, reboot your router. Only when the router comes back up, after a couple of minutes or so, should you plug back in the Sonos devices. I’d start with the BOOST first, so when the other Sonos devices come up, they have a signal to connect to.

I’d also be certain there is no WiFi credentials in the Sonos controller. You want the Sonos to be looking for a single source, and not switching between WiFi and SonosNet. 

Once everything comes back up, do some testing for a day or two, see if any of the ‘lag and dropouts’ occur. If they do, move forward with your cabling. If they don’t, I’d recommend that you then look in to how to set up reserved IP addresses for your network devices in your router’s manual. If a router has gotten to a state where it has handed out duplicate IP addresses once, it’s likely to do so at some point again, and you’ll be back to unreliable. Setting up reserved IP addresses will keep that problem from recurring.

Bruce
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