I was probably one of the first buyers of Sonos speakers in Hamburg. The boxes were new, expensive, but exactly what I was looking for. And I was super happy and deeply in love with Sonos. I love music. And the ability to listen to my music in any room at any time was phenomenal. The app responded instantly, there were never any issues, and soon I had 3 speakers (there was only one back then, the large one) and a bridge to which I connected my hi-fi system. The latter never really worked well, so I stuck with the pure Sonos system.
As with any love, when everyday life sets in, the picture starts to get scratches. Although my Sonos family grew larger over time, the Sub was quickly added, along with 2 ones, 3 threes, and a Symfonisk, but over time, the system became more unpredictable. Eventually, I lost interest in listening to music with Sonos. Every time I wanted to start a song, I was already afraid it wouldn’t work flawlessly. The music would cut off, and the wildest error messages appeared in my once harmonious SONOS world:
- Connection to Sonos product not possible
- Cannot play the selected item
- Cannot connect to the device. Please try again later.
- Error adding titles to the list (1002)
Or sometimes, nothing would happen at all. The spinning wheel of death would appear. Or music would play and immediately stop, or it would skip to the next track, and so on… The software, whether on mobile or desktop, no longer responded in real-time.
Of course, my home network isn’t exactly simple. I had Google Wifi for a while, then switched to Orbi, and recently an AVM Fritzbox has been doing its job. I tried using cables, creating a separate network for the Sonos boxes, removing the Gen 1 devices to switch to Gen 2, but… nothing worked. Studying the support page (accessible at http://IP-ADDRESS:1400/support/review) didn’t help at all, the quality of the connections between devices was mostly suboptimal.
A few minutes later:
A few minutes later again:
My last hope was the Sonos Boost. For nearly 100€, you get a Wi-Fi extender, but it’s more like the Boost creates its own Wi-Fi network for the Sonos devices, so they no longer cause confusion in the main Wi-Fi network. You can see the Boost in the screenshots above, and what you can also see is that it doesn’t really improve the situation. It feels like there are fewer problems with the main Wi-Fi, but Sonos is still sluggish and mostly unresponsive. It got a little better after I removed the Symfonisk from IKEA. Apparently, Sonos doesn’t like these devices very much, or maybe the antennas in the devices just aren’t that good.
When you also consider that Sonos tried to persuade owners of old Sonos devices to dispose of them and buy new ones in order to enjoy the next generation of software, unfortunately, Sonos is no longer recommended. Through my PhonieBox experiment, I’ve learned that you can build Wi-Fi boxes more cheaply on your own.