Play:1 devices dropping off wireless

  • 7 January 2017
  • 8 replies
  • 1120 views

Good afternoon folks. I've recently started into the Sonos world and have (5) Play:1s in the house. All are using wifi at this point, with the home network being controlled by a Cisco 2504 controller and Cisco 3502 APs. SSID that the players are connecting to are offered on both 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz on (2) APs, on different channels.

All devices connect and work, but it seems some/most of them drop off the network at times, as I can see them disappear from the controller list of devices, and I see the resulting DHCP request in the logs on the backend.

I'm in the middle of a field (literally), so neighbour interference should not be a factor. There are some distant competing APs, but nothing with a strong signal.

Looking for some direction here. Diagnostic # is 6973899.

Thank you in advance.

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8 replies

Seeing some interesting things in the logs.

It seems as though it connects to an AP, decides it's not happy, rescans and identifies another, while blacklisting the one it was just connected to.

AP found channel: 6 BSSID: 58🇧🇫ea:24:83:e2 sec: WEP rssi: 51
dc:a5:f4:1b:27:c2: better candidate

looking for AP [DEVICE_WLAN] (11)

58🇧🇫ea:24:83:e2: blacklisted or invalid entry
AP found channel: 1 BSSID: dc:a5:f4:1b:27:c2
No response from Sonos on this? I've got a similar problem. No changes to my home environment only pushing out the latest update from Sonos. While I have not seen my players disappear from the system they are losing their active music queue, which I believe is an indication that they dropped off WiFi. I am using a Ubiquity Wireless controller and will now go look to see if the devices have in fact lost connectivity, but not sure I will be able to find that much detail.
While you wait for their response to your submission of a diagnostic (you did do that, didn't you?), i think there's 2 possibilities here.

First, the speaker may be dropping wifi connection due to interference. You may want to check to ensure that no other emitting devices are within .5 meters of the speakers. If you happen to be on SonosNet, change the frequency assigned from where it's at to 1, 6 or 11.

The other potential might be a simple IP conflict, which would also cause them to drop off the wifi. That would require turning off all devices connected to your router, including the modem, and then starting with the modem, bringing them back up, one by one, allowing enough time for them to acquire a new IP address from the router. If you feel confident enough, assigning the speakers their own reserved IP on your router can help this issue not occur again. Check your router's manual on how to do this.

It is conceivable that I'm way off base here, which is why it would make sense to run that diagnostic within 10 minutes of losing a speaker and posting the number here, so that the folks who have access to that data could look at the log files and give you much more reasoned possibilities.
This is making me crazy. I've posted many times on this same issue. its seems there is no answer other than, only the bar was made for TV. Well that just sucks and therefore they need to stop advertising that the 5 can handle the TV Imput. I have several play 1 and play 3's in the same room (big room) and it drives me nuts that they randomly drop and come back on all the time. Makes it hard to watch a movie or anything doing with the TV. Might just go back to Bose. Like always, Sonos, I'm not expecting a response. Just wanted you to know I'm still here dealing with this issue. As are many others. Just to be clear, when not using the line in, the system works fine.
Does the Sonos connect work with TV's? Will I have the same issue?
Looking at the back of the Connect, it only has Stereo in, not optical, so you wouldn't be able to get a true surround signal into it, but you could potentially run regular "phone" (RCA jack) cables from your TV to it and use that. Of course, then you'd need to figure out if the 70ms delay is objectionable to you.

The Play:5 can also take a stereo input, just not from RCA jacks (those red and white things we're all accustomed to), but from a 3.5mm "headphone" cable like you would plug in to your smart phone. You still could potentially get an RCA to headphone cable, depending on your TV's outputs, and plug that in to the back of the Play: 5.

I'm truly sorry that you're having this difficulty. Before I bought in to the whole system, I looked carefully at the requirements, and recognized that to satisfy my needs, the only thing they offered was the Playbar, which I purchased, and have been quite pleased with the results since then. But I recognize that you feel you've been mis-marketed to, and have no defense for Sonos. I'd agree that it really isn't an ideal situation for them to be publicizing, and irks quite a few folks, some of them like you, who post here, but likely many more who don't bother, and choose other solutions.

Frankly, to me, it ends up being a marketing choice. I can easily see the marketing group at Sonos saying "don't add the appropriate inputs to everything, so we can sell different speakers to people who have different requirements". Or a product manager who says "I can save 50 cents per device by not including an input, and sell X million dollars more by creating a special kind of speaker". And I also think only Sonos can make the judgement on whether this is sensible business sense or not. But would I prefer things to be different? You betcha. I'd love a 3.5mm input on a Play:1, so I could save $300 to hook up my computer.

But so far, the world's been unwilling to change in order to make my own life the way I want. So I continue on.
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I am very frustrated by my Play 1 and Play 3 continually dropping wifi signal. i reboot...unplug router and wait. Then app says no connection. I am unable to reconnect. I deleted the app, reaquired from the apple store. attempted ty new set up and the Play 1 light turns orange then white. Not happy with the system
There's 2 potential issues that might be causing this.

First is Wifi Interference FAQ/ Definitely worth reading over, and checking your system.

The second is less likely, but still possible. That would be duplicate IP addresses, often surfaced when Sonos does software updates. The quick and dirty fix is to unplug all Sonos devices, then reboot your router. Once the router is back up, plug back in your first Sonos device, if you have one wired to the router, use that one. Otherwise, just the one physically closest to the router is fine. Once that device is booted up, move on to the next one. Repeat the process of plugging in and waiting for the speaker to boot before moving to the next one for all you speakers.

There's a longer term fix to this potential issue, which is reserving static IP addresses in your router for all your Sonos devices, but often requires a little research in to how your particular brand of router handles it.

Hope this helps.