
Sonos Replacement? - rwfilice
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.<p>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.<p>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
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whichdan
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...](http://help.pandora.com/customer/portal/articles/24294-using-
airplay-with-pandora)

[2] [http://support.spotify.com/us/learn-
more/faq/#!/article/Stre...](http://support.spotify.com/us/learn-
more/faq/#!/article/Stream-Spotify-using-Airplay)

~~~
rwfilice
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.

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jaz
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
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.

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

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

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

