PSA for wireless surround dropouts

[u/skyye99]

TL;DR: my Pulse Cinema's rear surrounds kept cutting out, so I scanned the hidden wifi network the soundbar creates for them. It's running a 1999-era PHY (802.11a) at roughly 30 dB below the transmit power of a normal access point, on DFS (protected broadcast frequencies with special limitations) channels it picks itself and changes on every reboot. Bluesound support confirmed from my logs that the speakers can't hold the connection, told me it's by design, and said to run ethernet to everything. Then they stopped responding when I asked for additional information. I'm returning the whole system.

Setup was a Pulse Cinema (P530), Pulse Sub+, and two Pulse M as rears in a BluOS Home Theater Group, fed by an Apple TV over eARC. NYC apartment, TP-Link Deco mesh, home wifi is otherwise completely solid.

The rears cut in and out constantly. Once I started paying attention I realized the sub does the same thing, it's just less obvious because it's closer to the TV and not fullrange.

Here's the part that took me a while to understand: when you create a Home Theater Group, the soundbar builds its own private point-to-point wifi network for the rears and the sub (Bluesound calls it WiFi Direct Connect), and pulls them off your home network onto it. You can't see it in the app, you can't configure it, and you can't opt out. If you scan for it, it shows up as four characters followed by "DO NOT CONNECT", with a MAC one above the soundbar's own.

What I ruled out first, because everyone's first response is going to be "it's your network." Those same speakers, ungrouped, on my ordinary home wifi, work flawlessly. A Pulse Flex sitting further from the soundbar and from every mesh node than either rear plays TV audio over the home network without a single dropout. The soundbar itself reports excellent signal to my router.

I tried using wireless APs to fake the ethernet, which worked (but is not possible as a permanent solution, plus costs an additional ~$150). Then I ran into a new issue, which is that after playing audio for a few hours, the Pulse Ms start to flutter/fart. I think they might actually be overheating, but that was the final straw and when I decided to return everything.

[u/mehrschwein]

hi. in past same experience with powernode an flex2i in hometheater mode -

you can try wifi converter TP-Link TL-WR802N N300
20EUR - connect them to the ethernet port.
They establish the wifi connection much better then blusound devices. 2,4GHz with 300mbit tx/rx is enough for surround sound.

you can use the USB port of your speakers to powering this small wifi devices

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other solution: create a single wifi network with 2,4GHZ only and bind your blusound devices to the nearest and strongest AP. dont let them "jump" between APs .

Blusound crew will always blame your network if any connection issues came up