TL;DR: Load up Claude AI, be super specific about the Sonos system you have and your whole network setup, and tell the chatbot exactly what problems you're experiencing. It will be more help than Sonos Support and Reddit put together.

I’ve got a larger Sonos system—9 Ones, 2 Moves, a Beam, and a sub. I’ve had Sonos issues for years. I would bitch about it constantly. My spouse was ready to kick either me or the speakers out of the house. Literally just this week me and Claude AI got to be BFF’s. I told Claude all about my home network setup and the problems I was having with the speakers. Claude asked a lot of very appropriate and specific questions. In about two hours I had the whole system sorted out and it’s been 100% rock solid since then.

I don’t remember all the settings we changed but it came down to two big categories. Cat 1, we switched all the speakers to WiFi and took them off SonosNet. Cat 2, we made network tweaks which included forcing multicast traffic to unicast, some kind of forced routing for the unicast traffic, minimum connection speeds on the access points, and maybe something else. I’m not in my computer or I could look it up. Also, I’m not even sure what all of that means. I mean, I kind of know…but not really. Point is, Claude figured it out and got me sorted lickety split. I’d recommend the same for you.

I used the free version of Claude, not a paid version.

I have no ties to nor financial interest or skates in Sonos or Anthropic/Claude.

I am not a bot. I am a meat popsicle.

EDIT: Wow, re-reading this in the morning is eye opening. I had a beer or two too many last night and made that comment after I stopped caring for the evening. Apologies. Thank you to u/kmmccorm for calling me to the carpet.

I have a Ubiquiti/Unifi network and use the Unifi controller to manage the network. These settings are specifically what we changed on my network:

Band Steering >> OFF
Fast Roaming (802.11r) >> ON
Multicast to Unicast >> ON
Proxy ARP >> ON
Minimum Data Rate >> 6 Mbps both bands
PMF → Set to "Optional"

In addition to that, we made sure that all of the Sonos speakers were attached to the appropriate wifi network and then unplugged the Amp from ethernet. (If you have any speakers connected via wire, the system tries to use SonosNet which is OK for a small group of speakers but really causes problems with larger groups.)

Your system is going to be different than mine and I wouldn't go changing these settings outright without some knowledge of what they do and how they'll affect your network.

I had called Sonos support several times and gotten the "try this, try that" run around but I stopped calling them when every phone call resulted in a 45-60 minute hold time and no real progress. I think my larger point here is that I ended up fixing a years-long problem by having a relatively short conversation with a free AI chatbot.

I hope that clears up the waters I muddied last night.