Sonos Replacement?

5 points by rwfilice 13y ago ↗ HN

We've had a Sonos system for about 2 years now - a Bridge component and 2 Play speakers. When it works, it's great - but it frequently stops playing or doesn't start at all - in short it's very buggy and completely unreliable.

What does HN use for this type of wireless music playing? We'd like to be able to play our music from a NAS and internet radio/Spotify/Pandora.

If anyone has advice on making Sonos work - here are the things I've tried: - 2 different routers (an old Netgear router, currently Apple Airport Extreme) - manually setting channels for the router and Sonos - trying multiple Airport 802.11 options (standard, only n, only b/g, etc etc) - forcing compression of the Sonos music stream - moving the various Sonos components around in an attempt to reduce interference - changed Sonos DNS to OpenDNS (recommended by Sonos support) - numerous complete Sonos resets - numerous Sonos component reboots - 15-20 calls to Sonos support with many diagnostics submitted and (obviously) no resolution

8 comments

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gadders 13y ago ↗

+1 on Sonos being unreliable. Even when I turn mine off it has to go through the whole "searching for a component" process.

jaz 13y ago ↗

For what it's worth, my Sonos bridge and Play:5 barely worked on the Airport Extreme. I switched over to a new Linksys router and it works pretty well now - and the Windows desktop app even works (it didn't before). I have my music library hooked up to the Windows app via a network share.

The biggest issue is still when a component powers down, you still need to search for it again.

rwfilice 13y ago ↗

Thanks - this is interesting. We switched to the Airport thinking that might improve things because our old Netgear router is really old - but maybe I'll try switching back or try a Linksys or something.

whichdan 13y ago ↗

Are you using a Mac? If you get an Airport Express, you can use Airplay[1][2] and just plug in some speakers.

[1] http://help.pandora.com/customer/portal/articles/24294-using...

[2] http://support.spotify.com/us/learn-more/faq/#!/article/Stre...

rwfilice 13y ago ↗

Thanks for the suggestion - and I've considered this - but from what I can tell you can't reliably sync more than one speaker using Airplay? I'd like to sync between more than one room if possible.

makerops 13y ago ↗

Oh man, thank you for this thread, I had heard only good things about the new play bar, and was going to purchase one this week...I guess not now.

rwfilice 13y ago ↗

Talk to other people - I think some people are really happy - but I can't personally recommend Sonos at all...

kylesnc 13y ago ↗

I've had several Sonos components for years. They have worked flawlessly for me.