As a proud owner of a Sonos zoo of five Play:1 I was somewhat disappointed that grouping the Play:1s upstairs didn’t work most of the time. We have one Sonos in the office, one in the sleeping room and one in the bathroom. We live in an expensive area, so our house is rather small and the rooms within are not to be thought of as wings of a palace.
Groups would work between the stereo pair in the living room downstairs and the bathroom and office speakers upstairs in every combination. Trouble always started when I added the sleeping room one to the mix. It wouldn’t play the music. But it would stop the whole group if I pressed the play button.
Additionally I noticed a certain sluggishness when operating the apps. It seemed to wait for something, sometimes. Hm.
Un-/Plugging all of the Sonos‘ at once didn’t help either. Swapping the sleeping room speaker with that of the bath room just transferred the odd behavior to the former bathroom occupant. So clearly, something was wrong in the network.
Now, we run a Fritz!Box and a Fritz Repeater. Looking at the list of connected devices I saw all of the Sonos‘ in the router’s list but only four of five on the repeater’s list. There seems to be the problem: I think the Sonos routing protocol wasn’t forwarded (or rather „backwarded“) to the router. The four Play:1s connected to the repeater could reach each other, but the one connected directly to the router was left out of essential parts of the conversation regarding grouping and un-grouping and what to play in the group.
All Sonos so far use the 2,4GHz WiFi network, so my fix was to disable the 2,4GHz network on the repeater. Now all Play:1s have to meet at the router. And lo and behold, grouping and ungrouping now works within a second, the „let me think“-cursor in the app is gone, too.
