Play 3 Powersupply fault.


Userlevel 3
Hi,
My Play 3 died the other day and I am just outside my warrenty period 😞 I contacted sonos customer services who did not help me in the slightest. I have now looked at the power supply board and seen that the board around one of the input capacitor has burnt out and or the cap itself.

As customer services won't even sell me a new power board, does anyone have a circuit diagram for this board so i can attempt to repair it myself. ( I am competent with electronics).
P/N: RN-002657 (board number)
Date: 08-04-11

Also has anyone else experienced this fault. I am assuming a power surge has done this.

Many thanks

Jamietaylor13

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103 replies

Userlevel 1
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Hi imagine-luismi
Sorry currently at work in Saudi so can’t check voltage output but roughly one side was 15v dc and the other was 5v dc

Thanks Jamie Taylor
I have now repaired 3 units all with the same PSU fault
I have one new play 3 under warranty 1 year old (as soon as it expires I will open it and check the PSU see if they did revise the PSU)
Ian
Hello again, it is clear that you are part of SONOS and that is why you do not give concrete solutions. I have been repairing electronics for many years and I have very clear that this model of SONOS PLAY: 3 was defective and you do not want to give electronic solution.

Userlevel 7
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Sonos employees are clearly identified as such.

I have had play:3s around my house for over 5 years and never had trouble with a single one. I even have 2 outdoor in my garage in humid and cold conditions year round.
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In response to Ryan S's comment about voiding warranties. I agree that people should not attempt a repair if it is still within the warranty period however this will now no longer be the case with this aged board I assume as a newer version will now be implemented. I would like to state that I called the customer service department and I was not offered any service to repair or replace the item. Granted it was outside the warranty period but literally by months. I was left to deal with this issue on my own. I really do hope that Sonos have improved their support in helping people maintain their products. Knowing that there is a good support service is critical in all industries and will only help the reputation of the company.

I will conclude that my Play3 is still up and running every day with no further issues. That's a three-year soak test! Thank you, Sonos for keeping this thread going and I hope it proves useful to those who own a Play3 P/N: RN-002657 (board number) dated 08-04-11 in the future.


Hi there,

In cases where a speaker is no longer working outside of the standard warranty, we offer an out of warranty replacement service for a reduced price. This is not offered if the speaker has been opened up, which voids the warranty, and also voids any out of warranty replacement service.
Userlevel 7
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Hello again, it is clear that you are part of SONOS and that is why you do not give concrete solutions. I have been repairing electronics for many years and I have very clear that this model of SONOS PLAY: 3 was defective and you do not want to give electronic solution.



Hi there,

Chris is correct in that Sonos employees are marked as such on the community.
Userlevel 1
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Hi
It’s clear there is a bad batch of PSUs in early models I have 3 that have been repaired
If anyone needs help with which components I have changed I’m more than happy to assist
Hi
It’s clear there is a bad batch of PSUs in early models I have 3 that have been repaired
If anyone needs help with which components I have changed I’m more than happy to assist


I have a stereo pair of Play:3's that were the very first ever manufactured. They have shown no PSU problems. Thousands of others report the same. I suggest to you that your problems may be more environmental than anything specific to the Play:3.
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Does anyone know where we could get a drawing ? PCB diagram?
If possible?
Well, from my experience and from two play: 3 devices that I still have not solved, I believe in two different breakdowns. One fault comes from the capacitors of 400v 33uF and another fault I think by the intermediate layer of printed circuit.

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Hi imagine-Luismi
In my 3 play 3’i have replaced....
The 3 caps 33uf 400v
The bridge rectifier GBU408 (GBU406)
The small t2a fuse red
All parts from RS COMPONENTS
I will find the part numbers for you to purchase on their site
Also you will need to repair the track from the rectifier to the caps see attached picture
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Here’s the parts I’ve had from RS
Userlevel 1
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Hi

Could you post a picture of the SMD thick film resistor r308 or tell me the number on it
I have a friend that changed the caps and not the rectifier the bad rectifier has burnt R308 out
See attached pictures
Hello again,
I think you were very lucky that your PLAY: 3 was repaired with just replacing the three capacitors and the bridge rectifier.
I just extracted the bridge rectifier and it's OK. It is complicated and tedious to repair without a technical manual. Resistor R308 is OK in both PLAY: 3. and it's 10K

Userlevel 1
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That’s great Luismi
I will order some now
I return home to the uk 13th Oct
I could check whatever voltages you need then ?
Hope this helps
Are you in the uk ?
I could ship a working PSU To you ???
Thanks
Ian
Hello,
I live in Spain, Granada.
It would be of great help the output voltages and / or the TP test point.
I did not understand exactly "I could ship to working PSU To you ???"

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Hi Luismi I could have shipped a working PCB to you to fault find then ship it back to me
Nevermind
I Could face time you to help

Moderator Edit: Removed email address. No personal information is to be posted, for your own safety.
Userlevel 3

In response to Ryan S's comment about voiding warranties. I agree that people should not attempt a repair if it is still within the warranty period however this will now no longer be the case with this aged board I assume as a newer version will now be implemented. I would like to state that I called the customer service department and I was not offered any service to repair or replace the item. Granted it was outside the warranty period but literally by months. I was left to deal with this issue on my own. I really do hope that Sonos have improved their support in helping people maintain their products. Knowing that there is a good support service is critical in all industries and will only help the reputation of the company.

I will conclude that my Play3 is still up and running every day with no further issues. That's a three-year soak test! Thank you, Sonos for keeping this thread going and I hope it proves useful to those who own a Play3 P/N: RN-002657 (board number) dated 08-04-11 in the future.


Hi there,

In cases where a speaker is no longer working outside of the standard warranty, we offer an out of warranty replacement service for a reduced price. This is not offered if the speaker has been opened up, which voids the warranty, and also voids any out of warranty replacement service.


Thanks Jeff S,
This may be the case now but it was not offered to me at the time of my fault prior to me opening the speaker housing. This is why, as stated in my original post, I had no other option than to look into the fault my self and why I stated in my following post that I do hope that the support has improved.

I also want to state in reply to Jgatie's comment about it being more environmental than specific to the play 3. I agree that there will be thousands of working units out there no doubt. As a Sonos advocate, I really hope that the issues we see here on this forum are rare cases. However, this does not detract from the fact that we see repeated PCB's with the same version and date faulting in the same manner. Correct me if I am wrong but I have not read any reports of other version numbered boards failing in this way. Should this be an environmental issue then there would not be such a commonality of failure.

Please let's focus on the issue at hand which is helping people with the same issue.
1) If in warranty, contact Sonos for a repair/replacement
2) If outside the warranty, contact Sonos for a price to fix or replace prior to breaking the warranty seal on the housing.
3) If competent enough to do so, follow peoples experiences in this forum to assist with their own fault finding and repairs.
I'm somewhere in between. I probably can repair mine if I know the part numbers. But I can't really justify spending the money for the replacement of mine out of warranty. I may think about just getting an Amazon Echo, instead, though I really loved having my Play:3 for quite a while. I didn't use it a great deal, so I'm not sure how long it would have lasted had it been on 8 hours a day.
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I too have had this fault with my PLAY:3, and upon dismantling it is clear that there is damage also to one of the surface mount diodes. In fact, excatly the same as ovidiu1971's post. I have sourced some new capacitors to replace those, however I am not sure what spec this component is, and wondered whether any of you have had the same issue and if any solution was found? It appears to be D307, and has a code of AN 97 printed on it. As far as I can see, I will have to bridge the track to wherever the diode's anode was connected.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated, as I cannot find a schematic or circuit diagram anywhere, and the board is quite badly charred!! :)

Userlevel 1
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One of my Play-3s has died on me. Given the likelyhood that there has been a bad batch of PSUs in the past, is there any way to identify, without opening the housing, whether my Play-3’s PSU was part of that batch (ie via the reference number on the outside of the housing)?
Userlevel 2
Hi Everyone,
I have not checked this thread since I resolved my issue and I am absolutely amazed to see the activity on this topic. I'm glad that my fix assisted others who are competent to do this work but I also feel sad that the vast majority of people who experience this issue outside of their warranty period have to fork out a lot of money for what is a relatively simple fix. It is clear that the batch has a common fault and I hope this was engineered out in future iterations of the board. In my opinion, this should have been recalled if there is a common fault on this product version as this thread seems to demonstrate in my opinion.

In response to Ryan S's comment about voiding warranties. I agree that people should not attempt a repair if it is still within the warranty period however this will now no longer be the case with this aged board I assume as a newer version will now be implemented. I would like to state that I called the customer service department and I was not offered any service to repair or replace the item. Granted it was outside the warranty period but literally by months. I was left to deal with this issue on my own. I really do hope that Sonos have improved their support in helping people maintain their products. Knowing that there is a good support service is critical in all industries and will only help the reputation of the company.

I will conclude that my Play3 is still up and running every day with no further issues. That's a three-year soak test! Thank you, Sonos for keeping this thread going and I hope it proves useful to those who own a Play3 P/N: RN-002657 (board number) dated 08-04-11 in the future.


First I would like to thank @jamietaylor13 for his great work here, especially taking the time to draw the schematic of the front end of the PSU and providing the first set of pictures. My Play 3 died, but somewhat less dramatically, and replacing the three 400V caps seems to have fixed the problem (at least I now have the correct output voltages on the connector).

I would also like to comment on some of the responses that suggest that this forum doesn't represent a systemic problem ("environmental" issues or "3 or four doesn't make a trend" comments). The issue is not that there are lots of working Play 3's, or that this forum represents a biased sample because only people with this problem have ended up here; of course those are both true. I think the correct issue to focus on is that, if this problem was not specific to design or execution, it would be likely that the reported problems would have random numbers, rather than concentrating on just one date/RN. There is data here to assess this issue, and with one assumption we can compute the probability of this being a random failure across many in the population.

There are 26 examples of this problem on this forum (including mine). Of these, 17 (including mine) are reported from the same board date and same revision number. Of the nine that have the C306 problem but don't state the date/RN, none report a different date/RN. These are: @mave64, @jjm, @Birche, @yeric, @davieserv, @ovidiu1971, @Andrew2306, @iandor, and @dan2511. Let's use the worst case that they all have different dates and RNs (extremely unlikely). Let's assume that there have been only five different board dates/RNs (a very conservative assumption, although I am happy to be corrected by @sonos if there have been fewer). Applying the binomial distribution, the expected number of same dates/RNs would be 5.2 and the probability of getting 17 out of 26 would be on the order of 0.0000006, or in short form, not.

Thanks also to @sonos to leaving this up.
And another one. RN002657 08-04-11. Power supply board looks like all the other photos.

I didn't even know what a Sonos was until I was given this by my nephew to look at as it was dead. Without opening it I knew what I was going to find as an internet search had found this thread.

I feel that Sonos are a reasonable company to support such a facility for keen DiYers. I recently had to fix a LauraStar, high end steam generator iron, with a burnt out control board. This company too would not sell replacement components to DiYers, understandable, but there was no equivalent group for amateur fixers, I sorted it eventually.

As someone else commented earlier in the thread is the problem the close proximity of C306 to the bridge rectifier, especially as they are glued together, or is it an underspecification of the PCB track. I don't know enough about electronics to know if an overheated and failing capacitor or rectifier would cause overheating in the copper track. I doubt its a primary failure of the capacitor as I assume all three came from the same batch and its only C306 that fails. I'm also insufficiently knowledgeable to answer the previous questions about D307, mine is just on the edge of the scorched area so I'm hoping it and its connections have survived but I think the connection at the scorched end goes through the multilayer pcb to join the negative plane on the back. The hand draw schematic from the OP is very helpful in understanding what must be bridged after replacing components. I'm off to test then order components.

Chris
Another of the same PLAY:3 power supply failure here too. It failed a couple of months ago, well out of warranty, and I just got around to having a look. Same PSU board as everyone else's. Same fault - although the PCB is so burnt out I can't tell which components have been affected or what damage to PCB tracks has been done.

I'm very disappointed. Needless to say, I won't be buying SONOS again.

I don't like throwing out the rest of the expensive speaker parts that still work but what else can I do ?
Userlevel 7
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If you hadn't opened it yet Sonos has some exchange options that are often the best deal you can get.

Once opened maybe sell it on ebay for parts and see if you can find a replacement there cheap?
Hi,
guys have the same problem, late is no d307 (AN97) help please :(