A9 i am losing my mind

Hello Folks,

 

I recently purchased the A9, and while i am wowed by mostly everything about it, i have one problem, when i start airplaying from any of my mac devices, and i have them all, it will play for a few mins or a few seconds or an hour and it will just drop the music, sometimes i lose it (the A9) in the airplay menu and other times it is there in the menu but the music just stops, it is very frustrating, I spoke to the dealer and he told me it was my wifi, i also spoke with another actual B&O outlet with little help, however I did purchase the green cover from the dealer, very nice too!

anywho shall i take back the speaker on warranty, shall i change my internet, provider, upgrade my router?

 

any definitive help would be much appreciated

 

mb

Sorry that your are having dropout issues. Here are my recommendations to try and sort it. It worked for my playmaker which had the same type of dropout issues

Make sure the A9 has the latest firmware

Run SSIDer and make sure your wifi is running in a clear channel (not overlapping with others nearby) run it when the homes around you are full of people so all wifi's are active. http://www.metageek.net/products/inssider/

Make sure your routers firmware is at the latest level

Let us know how you go

Markandsaz:

Hello Folks,

I recently purchased the A9, and while i am wowed by mostly everything about it, i have one problem, when i start airplaying from any of my mac devices, and i have them all, it will play for a few mins or a few seconds or an hour and it will just drop the music, sometimes i lose it (the A9) in the airplay menu and other times it is there in the menu but the music just stops, it is very frustrating, I spoke to the dealer and he told me it was my wifi, i also spoke with another actual B&O outlet with little help, however I did purchase the green cover from the dealer, very nice too!

anywho shall i take back the speaker on warranty, shall i change my internet, provider, upgrade my router?

any definitive help would be much appreciated

mb

I suspect the firmware is similar to the playmaker. I have 3 pm and the amount of dropout is unbelievable to the point of despair tried all sorts of combinations but to cut the long story short plucked up the courage and bought the linksys ea6700 router and all the problems went away no more dropout

Try the router option

All the best

Vince

Same here! Changing the router resolved the dropout issues.

Yendys:

Run SSIDer and make sure your wifi is running in a clear channel (not overlapping with others nearby) run it when the homes around you are full of people so all wifi's are active. http://www.metageek.net/products/inssider/

I don't completely agree with this. Fixing your channel isn't always the right way to guarantee fewer dropouts. I tried fixing my channel, but the problem is, 99% of wifi networks are set to automatically set a channel and often they'll conflict with my fixed channel - meaning fixing does nothing to solve the 'clear channel' problem.

Instead of fixing your wifi channel, the best solution is to set a permanent IP on the A9. I had dropouts galore with my Playmaker - tried ethernet, setting a fixed wireless channel etc - but configuring the PM so it had a fixed IP address, sorted the dropouts.

moxxey:

Instead of fixing your wifi channel, the best solution is to set a permanent IP on the A9. I had dropouts galore with my Playmaker - tried ethernet, setting a fixed wireless channel etc - but configuring the PM so it had a fixed IP address, sorted the dropouts.

That's actually a very good idea

B&O should develop a much better setup guide when their are dropout issues do the following....

Like others in the thread I too have linksys router

First of all, your internet provider has nothing to do with this matter. So scratch that idea :)

I have the A9 and experienced similar problems. I solved it by buying a new router, in my case the Apple Airport Extreme.

Unfortunately Airplay is very sensitive to the wifi quality. This is a huge problem if you live in the city where the wifi frequencies are very congested. Most modern routers does a good job of automatically changing wifi channel.

Furthermore you should follow moxxey's advice about giving your devices a fixed IP address. This way you can prioritise your devices in the Network.

You should also think about the positioning of your router. Make sure it isn't shielded or the front of the router is faced away from your connected devices. The antennas in any router works best is a specific direction.

A quick fix would be if the A9 supported n or ac networks (currently only g networks are supported). This lack of support for the newest standards are due to the Airplay chip manufactured by a supplier appointed by Apple. In other words, it's not B&O fault that you are forced to use the over congested g-network.

With most routers you can assign a (fixed) IP address to the devices with their unique MAC address. Assign an IP that is not in the DHCP-pool, and leave all the devices in default.

Much easier if you want to move a NAS, A8, A9, Beolit or whatever to another wifi network.

I don't know if it helps for dropouts, but also my iPhone and iPad have a fixed IP address this way.

Don't forget the possibility to connect the A9 via wired ethernet instead of wifi. Today most of us have a lot of wireless units on our networks - which makes the network slower and filled with data. Moving the A9 to a wired connection would directly cut the wifi traffic on a airplay-session in half (just your iPhone or other device transmitting over wifi).  

And if your router supports 5 GHz, try moving all your clients that support it to that. If the device sending the music is on the 5 GHz network it saves half the traffic for the 2,4 GHz network. 

5 GHz is perfect for small appartments in the city; fewer people using it and the range is shorter.

@Markandsaz

 

You should tell us more more about your setup. What router are you using? Where is the A9 standing in relation to the router, what kind of walls and what material are between? Do you live in an apartment block, or in a solitary house? How have you assigned channels on the router?

 

I live in an apartment with lots of noise on the wifi bands from the neighbors. I used to have airplay dropouts, but getting a powerful router (Airport Extreme) and letting it find the most optimal channel fixed my problems.

mossey ive seen alot of post where you say a permanent ip adress is the solution. i really cant figure out how to do this ? can you please help. my speaker is the a9 gen3

I have an A9 MK2 and AirPlay works flawlessly. In my case I have a strong wifi throughout my home. I use Google wifi mesh and I get perfect sych with AirPlay 2 across multiple devices even mix and matched across speakers.