Don't buy the Sonos
I spent two and a half months trying to get this speaker to work. It has been replaced with a Bose bluetooth speaker.
This topic has been closed for further comments. You can use the search bar to find a similar topic, or create a new one by clicking Create Topic at the top of the page.
Page 2 / 2
I don't doubt your qualifications, and I do believe that my DSL should have been up to the task. It certainly is now with my new setup. But why didn't my Sonos work? No one knows as it turns out. Do you have any proposed ideas as to why it won't work? You seem qualified to at least speculate, since my DSL should be up to the job. Previously unknown flaw in software? Faulty hardware?
At the risk of being repetitive: why: 1) did the problem got worse with time; and 2) why did streaming the same XM channel through the same WiFi, through the same phone, into hard-wired headphones or my bluetooth speaker using SiruisXM's mobile app, work perfectly?
If i could find answers to these questions, from anyone knowledgeable, perhaps the problem could be solved. Despite all the diagnostics sent to Sonos, they have no answers after weeks of trying.
At the risk of being repetitive: why: 1) did the problem got worse with time; and 2) why did streaming the same XM channel through the same WiFi, through the same phone, into hard-wired headphones or my bluetooth speaker using SiruisXM's mobile app, work perfectly?
If i could find answers to these questions, from anyone knowledgeable, perhaps the problem could be solved. Despite all the diagnostics sent to Sonos, they have no answers after weeks of trying.
I didn't see the subsequent reply - my ping is the same as yours, as is the rest of the performance. I contacted my ISP and they find no problem with my modem or my wireless. When I had the Sonos, it worked fine at first, until after two months it reached a point at which I could not even stream music from my iTunes without skipping. There have been no other issues with any other devices using that DSL. Once the Sonos was removed and replaced with the bluetooth speaker there have been no issues whatsoever.
If streaming works, on your DSL, then it should work with Sonos. That points to it not being your DSL.
Have you tried streaming locally, from files on a PC or laptop? Is this what you meant by "from my iTunes"?
I would strongly suspect issues with wireless, and local streaming issues tend to confirm this. Wireless isn't as simple "as it-works-or-it-doesn't". It can work fine on one device but not on another. In some cases it can be because the working devices are interfering with the non-working ones.
The other thing to bear in mind is that phones and PCs are designed as general purpose devices with gigabytes of memory. Phone apps, especially, are designed to work in environments with poor data and will tend to buffer a lot to compensate for the occasional spotty connection. Sonos systems, basically being speakers with embedded "smarts" will do this too, but have limited memory space to do this in.
There's all sorts of things which can impact a Sonos setup in this way, including:
- The topology of your network (wired/partially wired/totally wireless)
- Using wifi or Sonosnet
- The presence of potentially conflicting wireless devices such as DECT phones
As a general rule, whilst wirelessly connecting Sonos to your existing wifi is more convenient, using the inbuilt "Sonosnet" mesh network is far more reliable. Many home wifi networks are not really built for robust streaming.
Another test to do, if you haven't got this setup already, is to wire one of the units and deselect wifi in the app settings. This will make the Sonos units form their own wireless mesh separate from your wifi.
I am surprised the Sonos support staff couldn't help you on this though.
Cheers,
Keith
Have you tried streaming locally, from files on a PC or laptop? Is this what you meant by "from my iTunes"?
I would strongly suspect issues with wireless, and local streaming issues tend to confirm this. Wireless isn't as simple "as it-works-or-it-doesn't". It can work fine on one device but not on another. In some cases it can be because the working devices are interfering with the non-working ones.
The other thing to bear in mind is that phones and PCs are designed as general purpose devices with gigabytes of memory. Phone apps, especially, are designed to work in environments with poor data and will tend to buffer a lot to compensate for the occasional spotty connection. Sonos systems, basically being speakers with embedded "smarts" will do this too, but have limited memory space to do this in.
There's all sorts of things which can impact a Sonos setup in this way, including:
- The topology of your network (wired/partially wired/totally wireless)
- Using wifi or Sonosnet
- The presence of potentially conflicting wireless devices such as DECT phones
As a general rule, whilst wirelessly connecting Sonos to your existing wifi is more convenient, using the inbuilt "Sonosnet" mesh network is far more reliable. Many home wifi networks are not really built for robust streaming.
Another test to do, if you haven't got this setup already, is to wire one of the units and deselect wifi in the app settings. This will make the Sonos units form their own wireless mesh separate from your wifi.
I am surprised the Sonos support staff couldn't help you on this though.
Cheers,
Keith
"Another test to do, if you haven't got this setup already, is to wire one of the units and deselect wifi in the app settings. This will make the Sonos units form their own wireless mesh separate from your wifi." I did that. I spent another $100 on a Boost, and I had it hardwired in my wifi so the Sonos speaker had 'priority' - they walked me through all of that. It sort of worked at first, but got worse as time went on. We went through all of the checks for interference, changed channels through just about every permutation possible. The tech and I became so close we began to pick out drapes and furniture.
It's sad, I really liked the system for the first three weeks I listened to it. It has many inherent advantages. The trouble with all these gadgets and their associated software is that it's so easy to get caught up in fixing it, tweaking it, troubleshooting it, that the original purpose of it becomes almost completely obscured: listening to music. Everybody at home would listen and say: "it's skipping again...it did it again!" I'd go to the bathroom and upon my return my wife would give an update of how many times it skipped in the 3 minutes I was absent.
Sometimes I think the job of software people is to ruin lives and deliberately induce madness. I just want to spend time listening to music, not fixing broken-down shite or tracking down problems. I do that for a living in my lab; I don't want or need it after work, and once you lose my confidence, it's over.
I see I have earned the badge: "almost famous" (see right side of page). I'd gladly go away if I had my money back. Until I feel like I have gotten $300 worth of moaning and complaining in, I'll stay around a bit, or at least until I get booted. In the weeks it took to deal with tech support back and forth, all of the return warranties had lapsed, and from Sonos (or Amazon) there is no sympathy to be had. I also love it when people chime in and say: "mine works fine and always has since the Cretaceous Era." Great. Mine doesn't and I'm out $300.
It's sad, I really liked the system for the first three weeks I listened to it. It has many inherent advantages. The trouble with all these gadgets and their associated software is that it's so easy to get caught up in fixing it, tweaking it, troubleshooting it, that the original purpose of it becomes almost completely obscured: listening to music. Everybody at home would listen and say: "it's skipping again...it did it again!" I'd go to the bathroom and upon my return my wife would give an update of how many times it skipped in the 3 minutes I was absent.
Sometimes I think the job of software people is to ruin lives and deliberately induce madness. I just want to spend time listening to music, not fixing broken-down shite or tracking down problems. I do that for a living in my lab; I don't want or need it after work, and once you lose my confidence, it's over.
I see I have earned the badge: "almost famous" (see right side of page). I'd gladly go away if I had my money back. Until I feel like I have gotten $300 worth of moaning and complaining in, I'll stay around a bit, or at least until I get booted. In the weeks it took to deal with tech support back and forth, all of the return warranties had lapsed, and from Sonos (or Amazon) there is no sympathy to be had. I also love it when people chime in and say: "mine works fine and always has since the Cretaceous Era." Great. Mine doesn't and I'm out $300.
I'm using a similarly limited DSL broadband connection with peaks of 12.5mbit/s. Sonos works pretty much flawlessly in standard wifi mode. The only ongoing issue I recognized are constant dropouts with a single (rather exotic and small, thus bandwith-limited) webradio station via TuneIn. The stream is dropping every couple of minutes and eventually is fully stopped by the dedicated zone player due to too many recent errors.
I got around this problem by simply playing this particular radio station through my VU+ box and send the signal into the Sonos environment by using a Connect.
Apart from that, any connected online music service just works like a charm, may it be Deezer, Spotify, Tidal in hires or even the rather exotic ones like Batanga, Mixcloud and alike. I can even simultanously stream internet videos up to 1080i to my tv without any hiccups while playing online music content on several zones.
Long story short: I very much doubt that Sonos has a general issue with DSL internet connections. You live in a rural area, the technical infrastructure at your location is most likely to blame. Enjoy the countryside.
I got around this problem by simply playing this particular radio station through my VU+ box and send the signal into the Sonos environment by using a Connect.
Apart from that, any connected online music service just works like a charm, may it be Deezer, Spotify, Tidal in hires or even the rather exotic ones like Batanga, Mixcloud and alike. I can even simultanously stream internet videos up to 1080i to my tv without any hiccups while playing online music content on several zones.
Long story short: I very much doubt that Sonos has a general issue with DSL internet connections. You live in a rural area, the technical infrastructure at your location is most likely to blame. Enjoy the countryside.
"...technical infrastructure at your location is most likely to blame". Then why does my iPhone stream music perfectly through the SiriusXM app to my Bose bluetooth speaker? That connection presumably goes from SiriusXM -> ADSL modem -> wifi -> phone -> speaker. Likewise, I can directly stream music stored on my phone flawlessly to the bluetooth speaker.
I am surprised that Sonos hasn't at least requested to look at the hardware.
I am surprised that Sonos hasn't at least requested to look at the hardware.
I am surprised that Sonos hasn't at least requested to look at the hardware.
You sent them a diagnostic earlier though, right?
Userlevel 7
+20
Uhm, doesn't that all go over Bluetooth direct from your phone to the Bose speaker? I.e., not touching your internal network infrastructure at all, apart from the phone connecting to the Internet.
I am surprised that Sonos hasn't at least requested to look at the hardware.
Because either:
1) you have the phone set up to use 4G data. this is fast. I have a good internet connection, but I would have to complain to my kids to get on my wifi -- their 4G connection is faster than their phone on my wifi sometimes.
2) the siriusXM app may stream lower quality/less bandwidth than the sonos stream uses. OR the siriusxm app on the phone is built to work over a lower quality network connection, and buffers a lot to handle hicups/temporary network drops
I notice you have hardwired a Boost, have you tried removing the boost, and temporarily placing your play 1 near your router and plugging in the ethernet to see if it works then?
Do you have a separate dsl modem and wireless router? Or is it one of those all-in-one units?
I am surprised that Sonos hasn't at least requested to look at the hardware.
Different transport protocol (near-field Bluetooth vs 2.4GHz multicast wifi). One is limited to close range from a single broadcasting device to a single recipient, the other designed for sending audio over larger distances to multiple recipients, resulting in totally different possible issues.
I appreciate that you are having trouble with yours, but when you wade in here with a thread titled "Don't buy the Sonos" and then make claims that Sonos is incompatible with DSL based on a sample size of 1 then:
a) you shouldn't expect much sympathy with such an aggressive approach which seems to be designed to antagonize
b) when several others say "mine works fine", that not only disproves your claims but, cumulatively, does so with a far higher sample size.
And, as I've pointed out, statistically there must be hundreds of thousands of people using Sonos systems with DSL without problems. Turning it around I could say "I love it when people have localised problems and suggest there's some fundamental flaw with Sonos kit. 100's of thousands of people, including most of us, don't. So why should we take any notice of you?"
Long story short: I very much doubt that Sonos has a general issue with DSL internet connections. You live in a rural area, the technical infrastructure at your location is most likely to blame. Enjoy the countryside.
I know DSL isn't to blame. This is especially true if it impacts local streaming. A ropey DSL connection could affect streaming content from Spotify or Internet radio, but it simply will not affect local content. Even if you disconnected your Internet connection, local content would work on Sonos. I know because I've done this many times in the past.
The fact that local content seems to be affected points to wireless issues. It may well be a neighbour has recently installed a new Wifi network which is drowning out everything else in the immediate area. It could be the OP's own wifi router needs the settings changing (although that seems unlikely given Sonos support should have gone through this). It could be the OP lives in a castle with foot-thick granite walls. It could be they have a faulty bridge...
There's a lot of potential issues here. DSL as a technology isn't one of them. And it doesn't look like his specific DSL connection is either.
Cheers,
Keith
I didn't come here for sympathy. I came to find to way to get my money back, but that's not happening. I can't sell it here, so that's out. I also came in hopes an experienced Sonos employee would come in take a fresh look but there don't seem to be any actual designated Sonos SME's here. Perhaps one is here and I missed him.
I am well aware that when people come to a forum it's usually with a problem, and I'm well aware of the + star Amazon rating. Thus I am aware that 99.9% aren't having any issue.
I am aware how bluetooth streams. All music is routed through my cell phone to the speaker via the bluetooth 2.4GHz band. If streaming from XM, it has to pass through the modem and broadcast via WiFi (2.6GHz) to get to my phone, at which time it rebroadcasts on the bluetooth band to the speaker.
As far as difference in sound quality with bluetooth my 58 year old ears can't tell the difference. All I know is I found a solution that works. That is #1. I don't care how new, interesting, cool, cutting edge any technology is. The sole requirement is that it must work and it must work all of the time. Sonos did not meet that requirement for me, whereas it obviously works for nearly everyone else.
Anyone else coming here and reading this thread will see that it is always wise to keep an eye on the calendar so the 30 day window doesn't pass by without being absolutely sure all problems are resolved. Also keep all boxes, packing materials etc. That was hard to do in this case because it took a while for the problem to surface then gradually got worse. By the time the problem really surfaced it was too late. I can probably try to send it to them to see if it's defective in which case they might at least replace it.
I am well aware that when people come to a forum it's usually with a problem, and I'm well aware of the + star Amazon rating. Thus I am aware that 99.9% aren't having any issue.
I am aware how bluetooth streams. All music is routed through my cell phone to the speaker via the bluetooth 2.4GHz band. If streaming from XM, it has to pass through the modem and broadcast via WiFi (2.6GHz) to get to my phone, at which time it rebroadcasts on the bluetooth band to the speaker.
As far as difference in sound quality with bluetooth my 58 year old ears can't tell the difference. All I know is I found a solution that works. That is #1. I don't care how new, interesting, cool, cutting edge any technology is. The sole requirement is that it must work and it must work all of the time. Sonos did not meet that requirement for me, whereas it obviously works for nearly everyone else.
Anyone else coming here and reading this thread will see that it is always wise to keep an eye on the calendar so the 30 day window doesn't pass by without being absolutely sure all problems are resolved. Also keep all boxes, packing materials etc. That was hard to do in this case because it took a while for the problem to surface then gradually got worse. By the time the problem really surfaced it was too late. I can probably try to send it to them to see if it's defective in which case they might at least replace it.
The other reason I came here is for the email I just got, a request for me to contact a "Tier II engineer" at Sonos. 'Squeaky wheel' and all that. Hopefully he can help. Meanwhile I have music that streams flawlessly 😉
Hope you get it sorted.
Have you tried temporarily hardwiring your Sonos device to the router and trying it like that. Try it for diagnostic purposes. If it still has problems then I'm stumped.
Have you tried temporarily hardwiring your Sonos device to the router and trying it like that. Try it for diagnostic purposes. If it still has problems then I'm stumped.
I have been in contact with tier II support, but in the few days it takes to set up a callback, I set everything back up again. I downloaded the app, which was updated during the time I had it deleted. Now it works as it should. I had a couple of days where it would just stop (but no skipping) but rebooting the wifi every day seems to have taken care of that.
The tech went through my system remotely and found an extender that hops channels, and that is causing some interference. But he couldn't find anything terribly off, or enough to see the problems I was experiencing. The only real difference is the app, so maybe that was it.
The tech went through my system remotely and found an extender that hops channels, and that is causing some interference. But he couldn't find anything terribly off, or enough to see the problems I was experiencing. The only real difference is the app, so maybe that was it.
Generally my advice would be to buy another system. I have had a Sonos gen5 and a couple of gen1 units for the last couple of years and they have never really worked properly, dropping out speakers, forgetting half the system exists, not connecting with Spotify etc etc. In all seriousness it is an extremely user unfriendly and unreliable system and you are better off with other makes as we have found out. Great music however on the rarefied occasions you can actually get it to work.
Anyone else coming here and reading this thread will see that it is always wise to keep an eye on the calendar so the 30 day window doesn't pass by without being absolutely sure all problems are resolved.
The only thing wrong with that advice is that fixable problems can occasionally surface even after 30 days, or even after the warranty period as they did/do in my case. Such issues are part of any wireless home audio solution, and I am willing to stick my neck out and say that Sonos causes fewer than many others. But solving these as they arise is part of my excellent ownership experience. My way of doing this has been via posts here, and email escalation to Sonos when needed. Hasn't let me down yet, since 2011, even on the far side of the world in India.
I have Bose and other bluetooth speakers as well, as part of a horses for courses approach to solutions. I would not give up any of them for the other at this time. But for listening in the home/patio, Sonos rules.
I have an iPhone6 and DSL internet. As a test, I used the XM-Sirius app instead of the Sonos, and listened to it through simple headphones. Flawless. So, now the Sonos is gone, and replaced with a Bose bluetooth speaker, which is also flawless.
The expense was significant, near $300 total for the Sonos 1 speaker and then the Sonos Boost, both of which are out of return warranty by now, with the Boost being the newest at 6 weeks old. So, now I am stuck with $300 of useless electronic devices, which will have to eat or try and recover on eBay.
If you live in a flat apartment like me, wifi is becoming worse and worse caused by wifi interference.
I have put my router with my wifi after the provider router to have more control and 5Gz bandwidth.
But Sonos work on 2.4Ghz so it is still complicated, also considering that Sonos use the old g protocol.
Page 2 / 2
Enter your username or e-mail address. We'll send you an e-mail with instructions to reset your password.