Rethinking Whole-House Audio: Sonos (Premium)

Back in January, I started rethinking our approach to whole-house audio, and while Sonos immediately emerged as an obvious top choice, especially given the low cost of some recent entries, I immediately ran into a serious issue that threatened to scuttle this migration.

I guess I should have seen this one coming. But as a corollary to “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” approach, I also subscribe to the school of “I already figured something out, so I stopped thinking about how it works.” Put simply, something that solved a problem for me previously was suddenly causing problems for something new.

Sorry, let me try that in English.

When we moved to Pennsylvania almost three years ago, we installed a Google WiFi mesh networking system as an affordable way to get Internet connectivity everywhere in this new and much larger house. And it’s worked so well, and so consistently well, that I rarely even think about it. I never need to reset it, tinker with it, or worry about it in any way. It is, in short, everything that most personal tech is not: Reliable and predictable. Boring, even.

Until, of course, it’s not.

We’ve had various Sonos speakers for years. When we still lived in Dedham, I used a stereo pair of Sonos Play:1 speakers in our living room and a single Play:1 in our upstairs bathroom. When we moved to Dedham, those speakers all went with my daughter into her bedroom and bathroom, and we moved on to Chromecast Audio for the rest of the house, with those Edifier bookshelf speakers I always rave about in the sunroom. This worked pretty well for a while, but I experienced massive reliability problems throughout 2019, and by the time this year rolled around and Sonos made its legal complaints against Google, I was ready for a change.

As noted, Sonos was an obvious choice. But Sonos speakers and peripherals are expensive. In December, thanks to a great Black Friday sale, I briefly tested a pair of Sonos:One speakers in the sunroom to see if they would be an acceptable replacement for the Edifiers and Chromecast Audio, but it wasn’t even close, so I immediately returned those speakers to Sonos.

I also considered purchasing a Sonos Port, which would let me add my Edifier speakers to the Sonos ecosystem. At $450—four and a half times the cost of those speakers—Sonos Port seemed like a silly investment. Until, that is, you do the math: The closest equivalent Sonos speakers to those Edifiers is the Sonos Play:5, and that costs $500. Each. So a pair of Sonos Play:5 speakers would cost an incredible $1000. That’s a lot of money to pay to replace a $35 Chromecast Audio dongle and a $100 pair of speakers.

Given the cost, I figured I’d hold off on the Sonos Port and test other solutions in the meantime. I’ve written up only one of those solutions—Bluetooth—so far, but I’ve also tested the Amazon Echo Input (which is, sort of but not quite, a weird middle ground between a Bluetooth adapter and a Chromecast Audio, but for the Alexa ecosystem) and an Apple TV (which can be used as an AirPlay 2 adapter) with the Edifier speakers as well. And while I won’t be going in any of those directions, I will still write about them soon.

But it was a separate test, of the Sonos-based IKEA Symfonisk Wi-Fi Bookshelf Speakers, that helped cement my decision to go with Sonos. These smart speakers are cheap, for Sonos, at just $100 each, and you can pair them up, and use them as part of a whole-house Sonos solution, just like any other Sonos speakers. They sound great, and they are the equal of the Sonos:One (we have one in our master bathroom now). At half the price.

The final piece of this puzzle, however, was Brad: Thanks to his recent purchases of various Sonos home theater equipment, he no longer needed his pair of Sonos Play:5 speakers. And knowing that I was in the process of moving to Sonos, he made me an offer: I could have the pair for $500. That’s $100 more than the Sonos Port, but it seemed like the better option for a variety of reasons. So away we went.

An interesting side-note for anyone curious: My wife and I tested the sound quality of the Sonos Play:5 and Edifiers side-by-side, and while the Sonos did win out in the end, it was really close. My recommendation of those speakers doesn’t just stand, it’s been enhanced. They are really impressive.

But … The Sonos Play:5s are louder, overall. They offer a more spacious sound, if that makes sense. And because they are truly wireless, sans power cord, they can be placed basically anywhere.

But then the problems started. Just as I was starting to feel pretty good about spending $700 on Sonos speakers, I experienced dead speaker issues, both in the sunroom, with the Play:5s, and in the kitchen, with the IKEAs. I’d start playing music (or, in the kitchen, an audiobook or podcast) and the sound would only come out of one speaker. Sometimes, it would finally kick in on the other. But sometimes it would not.

What the hell.

A bit of Google-based research provided an answer: Sonos smart speakers are (not uniquely) sensitive to wireless interference. And the company recommends that those using their speakers over Wi-Fi configure their wireless router to use a particular wireless channel and then dedicate a different channel to Sonos. Concurrent to this, I recalled my daughter telling me that one of the speakers in her own Play:1 pair would stop working, too, and I had actually taken the time to troubleshoot it, and it seemed to work fine. But she had clearly been experiencing the same problem earlier.

OK, easy enough. But when I tried to figure out how to make this change with Google WiFi, I discovered that it’s not possible: The way wireless mesh networks works is to continuously change channels in order to deliver the best performance. There is no way to set it to a single channel.

Ah boy.

Switching to a different type of networking hardware—and spending hundreds of dollars more in the process—wasn’t appealing. And it’s likely that all mesh networks work the same way. But there was another solution, which Brad tipped me off to: Apparently, you can connect just one Sonos speaker to your router using a wired Ethernet connection, and that will allow all of your Sonos speakers to participate in a private Sonosnet network and eliminate the interference.

It sounded too good to be true. But to test this, I disconnected one of the kitchen IKEAs from that pair and placed it in the living room next to the TV and the Internet router. Then, I connected to the router and … it didn’t work. At all.

I eventually figured out that I needed to connect it to the Wi-Fi router—that is, Google WiFi—and not to my Internet provider’s router, since I disabled Wi-Fi there. I have a small switch attached to Google WiFi, so I reconnected the IKEA to that and … voila. It worked. Immediately.

We’ve been using the Play:5s in the sunroom successfully ever since, and I literally have tested them every day because I’m inherently distrustful. But they work fine. Every time.

The kitchen remains sans one speaker because it’s tethered in the living room. But I’ll just buy another one. So the total cost of this fix will be $100, a far cry from the cost of a new mesh network, or from the complexity and cost of wiring my sunroom for Ethernet. Which I may do anyway when it gets warmer.

Anyway. There you go. It was more painful than expected, and it was expensive. But I did finally get the start of a whole-house audio solution based on Sonos, and it’s finally working well.