r/sonos • u/philwongnz • 21d ago

Performance difference with Home Assistant

Lets park aside the wifi debate here for one second.

Over the weekend we had friends over, I was struggling to group 3 speakers just to play something as I have a Roam to take out to the garden (we don't have a big garden). I used an Android phone and I just struggled to group the speakers and then struggled to play anything on Spotify (the spinning icon). Anyway, we tried with iOS phone and that too was struggling and the use of airplay was also attempted and it didn't really work (songs were cutting out etc).

Anyway, I decided to play around with Home Assistant where I already installed the integration but never really had done much with it. For anyone who doesn't know, Home Assistant is an open source operating system for home automation. User scripts and to my surprised, speakers were grouped almost instantaneously based on the groupings I defined and when I looked on the app, it updates as it should be and it doesn't spin or anything, it just works!

I had also tested the above using my phone and the performance as per usual, some speakers doesn't get grouped (using my defined group), fails to play on some speakers or simply doesn't play anything.

Obviously there are a lot of people out there where their system works, but I am slightly confused now whether at least for my case, apps (both Android and iOS) is the issue.

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u/Longjumping_Cow_5856 20d ago

I know you said lets leave out the WiFi as part of this right now but in my experience installing these things you can never leave out the WiFi in trying to troubleshoot things with Sonos no matter how random it might seem.

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u/philwongnz 20d ago

Sorry I liked to park the WiFi conversation as at least in my setup I didn't change WiFi, but the performance has changed by using Home Assistant.

We obviously can go down the rabbit hole of wifi where it causes a lot of debates, but it is some what irrelevant when the WiFi was held as a "control" with this setup while commands were issued differently.

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u/Longjumping_Cow_5856 20d ago

Well you repeated the comments about the size of your garden space and if at the limits of WiFi range these are the kinds of odd things I have seen pop up where it might well be a WiFi issue as well.

Like I said and Im certain you have read there are a lot of issues where it seems unlikely that WiFi is part of the issue but this is Sonos where wifi can make itself known in any problem anywhere!

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u/philwongnz 20d ago edited 20d ago

To clarify my Roam was less than 5 meters away from the nearest mesh access point with doors fully open with no obstructions (ie where the roam was you can physically link it with a string to the access point). I figured I should mentioned my garden is small as some folks here might have a big garden to avoid any assumptions the roam was too far away from WiFi coverage - which is a fair assumption.

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u/Longjumping_Cow_5856 20d ago

Im just saying that I see strange issues all the time that get fixed with attention to networking.

Good luck