OT? Sonos advice please.

[T i m]

Hi All,

Could anyone experienced with multi-unit Sonos installs (ideally CONNECT:AMP) give me some advice re the (ideal?) configuration please?

A non-technical mate has such a system and apparently it is quite common when streaming radio over the Internet for it to stop for a few seconds. However, he is able to stream films to smart TVs and that seems fine ( ... no buffering) suggesting his broadband bandwidth is ok?

The guy who installed the Sonos stuff has vanished so mate he asked me if I could look into it for him. I've briefly seen (and heard ) the Sonos units in action but not witnessed it dropping out and not looked into the settings as yet.

Now, I believe all his Sonos units are individually hard wired back to a switch but may also have the wireless connectivity enabled.

One question is *should* the wifi remain enabled? Do the boxes do stuff over the wireless network that they can't do over the wired?

If 'no', can (/should) the wireless interfaces be disabled please?

Cheers, T i m

[Dave Liquorice]

Know SFA about Sonos but just thinking through the problem...

WiFi and Cat5 both carry ethernet and presumably both end up at the same place, (router/switch WHY) and thence to the 'net over the same connection. It's a good question but I'd be *very* surprised if there was any difference at all between the two as far as what the box does over either interface.

You need to establish if all the units are wired or if some are wireless along with which ones suffer buffering issues. I sure you can guess where that information is leading.

I can see a box with both interfaces active possibly switching from one to the other "just because it can" and this causing a gap in connectivity. It would be worth setting all wired boxes to wired only, ie turn off the WiFi.

[Adrian]

He's streaming films, but is he streaming broadcast TV OK?

When you start streaming a film or similar, the whole film is available to send to buffer. When you start streaming broadcast media - TV or radio - it isn't, so you're not getting any buffering (or more than a second or two).

[T i m]

;-)

Agreed.

*Except*, reading around they seem to have a Wireless 'SonosNet' that may do things differently over WiFi then the wired. So much so that some seem to suggested that WiFi is preferred and a recent firmware update means that none of the boxes need to be hard wired (it use to be that one needed to be hard wired).

I can. ;-)

That was my thought.

Understood but I don't think that is 'preferred' or even available via the simple GUI. However, being Linux boxes I think you can issue some CLI type incantations at them and soft or hard disable the WiFi interfaces. I'm still not sure if doing so has any other consequences though ( that it would remove the ability to use their configuration app on them directly etc).

I'll look into that further and am thinking along the same lies as you Dave (going wired only).

Cheers, T i m

[T i m]

Good question and I don't really know but I'm guessing 'I don't think he would need to'? By that I'm not sure they are 'TV people' and if they did want to watch TV would probably only do so live. That said, they do have Sky so if that has 'CatchUp TV' (if that's what you are talking about) and they use it ... I can ask (or would that be the same as watching a streamed Film ... if not 'live' etc).

Ok ...

To be clear ... if they aren't streaming TV, the streaming radio could be the thing most likely to show up connection issues (over say streaming Films)?

Cheers, T i m