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Sub & Surrounds showing ? on my system after working fine for years (Nest Wifi)

  • 5 August 2021
  • 4 replies
  • 118 views
J

I have ten Sonos products in my house and have never had any issues with my setup until this week and I’m about to lose it.

My Master Bedroom has a Sonos Beam with two Sonos Ones set up as Surround speakers.

My Family Room has a Sonos Arc with a connected Sub.

Both have worked flawlessly for YEARS in this setup on my Nest Wifi mesh, never a problem -- until this week. I noticed for both of those two setups, my surround and sub on both rooms are showing up as ? on my system in the S2 App and are not playing music. Here’s how it looks:

Family Room  TV (+?)
Arc

Master Bedroom (+?+?)
Beam

Two days ago I went through a few hours of self troubleshooting based on some posts. Factory resetting my speakers and trying to set them back up was giving me errors -- the speakers would connect individually but when I tried to add them as surrounds it would fail and give me an error message. I was finally successful by factory resetting my surrounds and sub, rebooting my main router and google wifi router/end points, and then setting the surrounds and sub back up.

This morning I wake up and I am back to the ? in my system - right where I started.

I have not changed any network settings, added or moved any products that might interfere, or done anything else that would have otherwise caused what was a perfectly fine working system to now be $1000+ of useless Sonos products in my house. My AT&T router wifi signal is off (and always has been) so the only Wifi signal is coming from my Nest router but again -- it has worked fine for so long so I have to believe this is a software issue with Sonos because why would it suddenly just stop working after no issues for so long? SOOO frustrating! When nothing changes then why do things break? All of my other Sonos products (including the Beam and Arc) are working fine it’s just the ones that are connected as Surrounds or Subs that are dropping. And they work fine if I reboot them as individual speakers but once they are connected as Surround or Sub this happens.

Wiring my Beam, Arc, or Sub is not an option due to their placement in my home, I would have Ethernet cable running across my family room floor.

I hate to spend more more to fix a problem but would wiring in a Sonos Boost be a possible solution?

I have submitted diagnostics 1798570628, can someone please help.

 

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Best answer by Corry P 5 August 2021, 15:12

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4 replies

ratty

Could the software on the Nest kit have updated itself? Some routers object to the IP address requests from the surrounds/Sub when they’re forwarded by the master home theatre speaker. I’ve not heard of Nest being non-compliant in this area, but it’s a possibility.

Your profile lists One SL and Play:1. As an experiment, take one of the them and wire it to the Nest primary/router (not the AT&T box). Wait 5 mins, then powercycle the surrounds/Sub. Check that all are then alive and showing in the controller, with ‘WM:0’ in Settings/System/About My System. 

J

Ratty, The two surrounds connected to my Beam are both Play 1s.  

 

The One SL is a standalone speaker I have ina different room.

 

Does that have any bearing on your recommendation on which speaker I should try plugging into the Nest router?

ratty

In that case temporarily borrow the standalone One SL and wire that for the purposes of this experiment. If you can bear to keep it in place for a day or two the evidence would be useful. 

If all goes well you could at least contemplate the purchase of a Boost with confidence that it should fix things.

Corry P
Userlevel 7
Badge +18

Hi @jfranzet 

Welcome to the Sonos Community!

I’m seeing some physical transmission errors from your Beam and Arc to their surrounds, and some strong WiFi reception - I presume, therefore, that your closest Access Point to each is a bit too close. If you can separate your Beam/Arc from the APs by about 1m, you should see some improvement. You many need to reboot the Arc/Beam if things don’t improve immediately. If it’s not the APs, please check for other possibilities.

@ratty’s suggestion of permanently wiring one Sonos product to the main Nest node is a sound one - from what I see in the diagnostics, it’s likely to improve things a bit, especially grouping, though it’s not likely to help with surrounds issue. If you do this, please keep the wired speaker and the main Nest node 1m apart too. All WiFi channels are quite busy, so you might need to try all 3 for SonosNet before getting ideal results. Settings » System » Network » Change SonosNet Channel.

You’ll likely find some of the information on the following links useful:

Reducing wireless interference

I hope this helps.

"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen." - Albert Einstein
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