Will Sonos boost help ?

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Will adding a sonos boost help me ?

I have beam + x2 play 1's in living room, x1 play 1 in hallway, x1 play one in dining room, x1 sonos 1 in the bedroom upstairs. Beam is connected via ethernet cable to a powerline adaptor in the living room (so effectively hardwired to my router if I understand that correctly). All my speakers are showing status WM 0. My broadband connection into my house is fairly poor, (getting around 2.5 - 4 Mbps) plus my house has quite a lot of thick stone walls which impairs wifi range (hence the powerline adaptor). My sonos speakers are placed such that they should all be in range of at least one other speaker in the network however.

I get quite a lot of dropout of music and often difficulty grouping speakers together.

Does it matter which order the speakers were added to the network ?
Would adding a sonos boost enhance reliability or does having the beam wired in effectively achieve the same thing ?

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Ken_Griffiths

Crossimus,

Each of your Speakers can act as a Boost device. You could take one of them and cable it direct to your router and it will start the SonosNet network. Your likely issue here is probably/possibly related to the powerline adapter. Some adapters are known to cause issues and i would suggest to avoid them, if at all possible.

When running on SonosNet (with one device cabled to the router) ensure the following:

1. Keep the cabled Sonos Boost/Speaker device at least 4 feet away from the router.
2. Set the SonosNet channel in the Sonos App 'Advanced Settings' to one that is at least 5 channels away from your router's 2.4ghz WiFi channel.
3. Remove/Reset your WiFi credentials from the 'Advanced Settings/Wireless Setup' in the App too, as these are not usually required when running your system on SonosNet.

J

John B

Hi. Order added has no effect, although order of grouping can have an effect. The speaker you start with is the 'group coordinator' so the stronger the signal (or wired) the better for that one.

A Boost might help if it enabled you to abandon the powerline adapters. These do sometimes cause problems, although many have reported successful use.

What sources do you use? Do you experience the dropouts with local sources or just internet-based ones?

What wireless channels are your router and Sonos on? They need to be well apart (e.g. 1 and 11) and keep a metre between router and Sonos component.

Edit: Ken beat me to it!

Ken_Griffiths

ha ha .. John normally beats me to it, that's a first for me, I think? ?

At least we seem agree about the powerline adapter ... I would see how things go without it to begin with and use it only as a last resort.

The internet connection of 2.5 to 4 mbps sounds painfully slow, I get far more than that even from a mobile network data connection... I would look to see if your service provider can perhaps help to improve that for you.

C

CrossimusAuthor

Contributor I

Thanks Ken and John,

Really helpfull comments both.
I am usually using internet based sources which makes me wonder if my broadband bandwith is part of the problem (yes it is painfully slow, joys of living in rural south Wales !).
I'll try bypassing the powerline adaptor and see if that helps.
My SonosNet channel is running on channel 6 but I don't know about my router (or how to find out particularly). I'll have to explore and then optimize the channel settings if necessary.

Thanks again

J

John B

You can imitate (more or less) the effect of a Boost by experimentally wiring one of your speakers to the router.

What router are you using?

Do you have a Sonos music library set up? Do you have music on your phone?

In the Android app store there are lots of free wifi analyser apps that will show you the channels being used. I assume likewise on Apple.

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