Thanks for completely breaking £2000 worth of Sonos gear

  • 15 October 2017
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Latest update has completely broken our setup and we are VERY ANGRY.

The latest update has completely shafted our perfectly working setup around the flat. We have 2 play 5's in a stereo pair in the front room, 2 play 1s in the bedroom, a play 1 in the bathroom, a new soundbar in the family room with 2 1s in surround config, a play 3 on the kitchen worktop and 2 play 3s in the dining room.

WE HAVE SPENT A FORTUNE ON THIS SETUP AND JUST BECAUSE YOU WANTED TO HAWK SOME NEW USELESS ALEXA SPYWARE CRAP IN YOUR NEW SPEAKERS, OUR SYSTEM IS COMPLETELY BROKEN.

Half of our speakers no longer work and the ones that do occasionally work drop out constantly.

If this doesn't get sorted out very quickly, I will consider legal action and judging by the number of other complaints I have read, I won't be alone. I will never buy any more Sonos products again, and I will actively dissuade anybody I know from buying them. Good lord what a shambles.

Sort this out please. And also, while you're at it, please sort out the abomination that is the new app as well, it is awful. Who on Earth did you test it on? How can a company I used to like so much get it so wrong?

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64 replies

You probably have IP address conflicts, which can arise when units reboot in an update. Rebooting your router and networked devices would probably fix it. You might try that before hiring the lawyers.
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Already done all of those things. But thanks for the condescending reply.
Your network is the issue, not your Sonos products. Fix it, and your Sonos system will be working just fine again.
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I would like to know exactly what else I can do to "Fix my network" other than switch everything off (including the router) and then powering things up again one by one. I've changed the Sonos channel - no effect at all. Changed the channel the Wifi router is working on - no effect at all.

All of this happened since we updated to this dog's dinner of a so called upgrade. Everything was fine up until that point.
Your ludicrous post deserved a condescending reply.
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Of course, how daft of me to get upset at having £2000 of audio equipment fail after a software update. Silly me for over reacting.

Sonos's stock in trade is reliable, drop out free audio and currently for me that is broken. But thanks again for being so helpful.
When people come on here and ask for help, lots of us do our best to help. When someone comes on threatening legal action and shouting they tend to get a less sympathetic hearing
Leaving aside the controller controversy, if there was a generic problem with the update that was breaking Sonos systems there would be hundreds of posts about it by now.

If you call Sonos Support tomorrow they will resolve it, remoting into your system if necessary.
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You do understand it's not you I'm directing my ire at right? I'm not threatening legal action against you. Please tell me what other course of action there is open when perfectly good equipment is broken with a software update.

I have spent the last 3 hours literally trying everything to get the system working again, including resetting all the speakers and adding them to the system again and it sounds awful. De-synched, dropping out constantly. This stuff is supposed to just work, that's why it costs so much and we pay up. If that breaks then there's no difference between Sonos and a cheaper alternative.

Hopefully someone from the actual company might respond with a more helpful tone. Sorry I didn't kiss your backside the way you like it in order to get help from you.
Make sure to shut down all other devices that are sharing your WiFi, not just the Sonos devices. Home routers, unfortunately, can assign IP addresses which are already being used by other devices when they are power cycled. Assigning static IP ranges to your Sonos devices will prevent it in the future. Also, using a Boost, or plugging one Sonos device into Ethernet will put your system in SonosNet mode, which is far more robust than most home WiFi networks.
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Try a chill pill, things are normally easier to solve and less stressful when 2 chill pills are taken up to four times a day.
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Chicks: Thanks for the suggestions. Already, one Play 5 in the front room is connected via ethernet as well as the soundbar in the family room.

Could you tell me how I assign static IP addresses to each speaker? I can't find anything in the Sonos settings so is it something I have to do through the router?
My first reaction is to simply ignore an aggressive post but here goes anyways.

If everyone was having the same difficulties as you are this would be serious indeed. My system is probably as complex as yours yet works well with the latest updates. It would therefore appear your issue might be particular to your setup.

When I have run into a problem over the 6 years I have used Sonos products, I have found Sonos technical support excellent at figuring out what the issue was and helping me resolve it. Rather than going online and "yelling" at everyone, I suggest you try them.

As to the design of the app or the feature content of an upgrade, simply referring to it as a "dog's dinner abomination" is not, in my opinion, particularly constructive or useful feedback. I have found that Sonos do value their customer's input, so maybe a bit more specificity in the appropriate forum section as to suggested likes or dislikes would be more productive.

I hope your system is back up and working in short order.
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@Meezer - thanks for telling me how great you thiink Sonos are. Sadly, this is scant consolation right now and I'm frankly exhausted after several hours of trying to get everything working again. I'm powering everything down and going to bed. If it doesn't get solved tomorrow, the lot goes on ebay.

I'm delighted for everyone here who doesn't have a problem, really.
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I am always amazed at the smug people who insist that something that worked perfectly well before an update and now doesn’t is somehow pure coincidence.... ..what caused the problem then?..the wind?...bit like the guy that drove into the back of me last week...apparently the dented bumper i had afterwards that was a spooky coincidence....seems to me it’s not to much to ask that something that's advertised as rock solid and no drop outs should meet that ....at least once in a while....
I am always amazed at the smug people who insist that something that worked perfectly well before an update and now doesn’t is somehow pure coincidence.... ..what caused the problem then?..the wind?...bit like the guy that drove into the back of me last week...apparently the dented bumper i had afterwards that was a spooky coincidence....seems to me it’s not to much to ask that something that's advertised as rock solid and no drop outs should meet that ....at least once in a while....You might care to note that my original reply did not suggest coincidence. In fact, has anyone suggested coincidence in this thread? Beyond that, I won't be rising to your bait.
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I am always amazed at the smug people who insist that something that worked perfectly well before an update and now doesn’t is somehow pure coincidence.... ..what caused the problem then?..the wind?
Though the wind could actually be causing issues, as it can have an effect on wireless performance, usually issues that come up after an update are caused as a result of the Sonos players restarting on the network.

The most common causes of post-update issues are routers that assign duplicate IP addresses on reboot, or wireless devices doing a channel scan at the time of restart and deciding that the wireless channel Sonos was on is now clear, and switching to use that one. When Sonos comes back up, suddenly the once clear wireless is now no longer clear. A third common cause of problems after an update is that there were problems, to begin with, and Sonos had been chugging along without knowing about it. The most likely case here is in a double NAT situation, where you have two DHCP servers on the network and Sonos was all connected to one of the two, but during the reboot, some players got caught up on the second one.

The reason the community starts with recommending reboots on the network devices is because that will often solve the issue. It will fix the first one above, potentially the third one, and possibly could the second, but that's hard to say.

@Geoff Simmonds, I'd be happy to take a closer look at your setup if you're still having trouble. Are you currently seeing some of your players? If so, could you submit a diagnostic from your Sonos system and reply back with your confirmation number? Any details you can provide would be great to help narrow down what's happening.
I am always amazed at the smug people who insist that something that worked perfectly well before an update and now doesn’t is somehow pure coincidence.... ..what caused the problem then?..the wind?...bit like the guy that drove into the back of me last week...apparently the dented bumper i had afterwards that was a spooky coincidence....seems to me it’s not to much to ask that something that's advertised as rock solid and no drop outs should meet that ....at least once in a while....

It is not smugness, it is years of experience with what happens to a small number of folks after an update and what works to fix it.

What causes these problems it is most often duplicate IP addresses. What makes these IP duplicates show up is the update process, which entails a reboot of each Sonos device, causing it to request a new IP. If your router is in a bad state where it's table of previously assigned IP addresses is lost due to a reboot or power failure, the Sonos requests for new IPs can result in a series of duplicate IP addresses being issued. So while the "cause" of these duplicates may be the update process, the actual software is not at fault, nor could Sonos do anything to prevent the bad state of your router's IP assignment table.

Same thing with the other problems mentioned by the Sonos representative above, a reboot of the Sonos system may cause the router to switch channels, but that too is neither a flaw in the Sonos software, nor is it anything Sonos could prevent. Ditto if you are running more than one DHCP server.

Luckily there are permanent fixes to all of these, reserve IP addresses in your router, set your WiFi to a fixed range of channels, and eliminate multiple DHCP servers by configuring one of your network devices as a router and the rest as wireless access points
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I'd like to apologise unreservedly for being a petulant and annoying "something or other" yesterday. I'd spent the previous 3 hours battling with the Sonos setup in the flat which was working fine before the update and which absolutely wasn't afterwards. I'm afraid nerd rage got the better of me and I feel somewhat embarrassed. Apologies to anybody I may have offended which is quite likely given the shouty nature of my first post the sardonic tone of my subsequent ones.

That said, I'm still quite unhappy with the status quo. After powering everything down last night and switching on this morning, all my speakers are visible and work, although the controller app is not as responsive as it was in terms of changing the volume and muting / un-muting rooms. But most annoying of all is the fact that the surround sound is awful....It drops out constantly and is not practically useable.

@Ryan S, I'll have a look tomorrow at submitting a diagnostic. I can't spend any more time right now on it as other tasks beckon, along with a general lack of enthusiasm to tinker further.
Geoff,

One thing that you didn't mention, that I'd recommend highly, is a reboot of your router while all of the speakers are turned off/unplugged. A reset of IP addresses might help some of the issues you're reporting, and just turning off the speakers doesn't quite do it, as the data is also stored on the router.

And definitely go with the diagnostic, when you can. There's a wealth of information in it that can help Ryan and his cohorts help you a lot, more than those of us speculating on the situation based on the data we've been provided.
I would reboot the controller devices too. They could be experiencing IP conflicts, especially if the reboots of the Sonos units seemed to work. Refreshing the entire network will flush them all out.
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Thanks for the suggestions. This morning I did as suggested and switched literally everything off - Routers, speakers, the lot. Then I switched the routers on first, then the speakers room by room. It seems back to normal with the exception of the surround, which the jury is still out on. It seems to take a few seconds to kick in and drops out a bit at first. It did settle down for the 20 minutes I sat watching the tv and listening for drops but time will tell how things bed in again.

I appreciate how some of this is out of Sonos' control but it's a nightmare when it happens. I switched to Sonos from Airplay for these reasons....I got so fed up every few weeks of having to switch everything off and on again, if you have speakers in every room it gets tedious. It hasn't been as bad with Sonos but every few months I need to at least switch off the speakers. I guess it's just the slightly chaotic nature of being in a Wifi dense area (there's tons of Wifi networks around me).

Maybe in a future update, Sonos could build in a reset feature on the app which reboots the speaker or even the whole network of speakers and which perhaps then are assigned new IP's by the router. It would at least save a lot of hassle going around the flat unplugging things.
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Hello Geoff ... if you have the time (and energy) try to find out how to assign fixed IP addresses on your router, as it should prevent future problems. I have done this with all of the 'permanent' equipment on my home network, including PCs, phones, tablets, TVs, printers - and of course SONOS speakers. That way conflicts are avoided between all of my different devices.
Good luck
Hello Geoff ... if you have the time (and energy) try to find out how to assign fixed IP addresses on your router, as it should prevent future problems.
The research needed to do this one time task will pay off by obtaining an environment that remains stable through all future updates, so this is highly recommended. IP reservation needs to be done for every Sonos component including the devices that host the controllers.
Geoff Simmonds,

Many users appear to set the IP addresses for all their Sonos products in their DHCP Reservation Table in the main router ... that tends to eradicate the type of matters you have been experiencing.

I chose to set all my 16+ Sonos devices starting from an IP address of 192.xx.xx.150 onwards and have never had a conflict issue since.

I also have fixed my routers 2.4 and 5 ghz channels rather than allowing it to auto-set them on reboot. I have checked that they are the least-used channels in my local neighbourhood by doing a WiFi Scan and finally I set my SonosNet channel to the least one being used too and keep it well separated from the channels set in my router.

If you do use a SonosNet connection, then I also recommend removing any stored WiFi credentials in the advanced settings of your controller. They are usually not needed when running your Sonos products with one device cabled directly to your router.

I certainly did not experience any connectivity issues whatsoever with any of my Sonos hardware arising out of the latest Sonos update.

On a slightly separate note, I do agree, the new controller App does need some additional cosmetic work, but I think Sonos have acknowledged they are still continuing its development and personally speaking I don’t really see it as a show-stopper... it’s not caused me any issues and I have seen more advantages than disadvantages.

So my suggestion is to scan and discover the best channels to use and set your IP addresses in your router's reservation table and hopefully all will then be well... you just need an hour or so, set aside, to sort these matters.