This automation is flakey and I'm not sure why

So here is an automation I’ve set up. I have a Sonos connect that is hooked up to my home theater receiver so that I can stream music to it. Problem was that I had to go turn on the receiver whenever I started the sonos, change the input, adjust the volume. Lucky for me there is a component for my receiver, and when I put it in my config file, it worked beautifully. I can control power, all inputs, and volume, and it’s super responsive when I do service calls.

So, if I hit play for the sonos in my Hass.io UI, it goes off without a hitch. But I gave it a shot this morning by using alexa to fire up the sonos. The receiver either wouldn’t power up, or only get partially through the actions. I’m not sure what difference there could be between using HA UI to start the sonos vs alexa starting. The trigger is simply if the sonos changes from paused to play…

Any ideas?

Heres the setup

Hi. My guess would be that the media player was in idle or off mode after being unused, so the trigger being paused to playing might not get activated.
I don’t use the automation UI but edit the yaml files. In your case I would state something like

  • alias: receiver start
    trigger:
    platform: state
    entity_id: media_player.living_room
    to: ‘playing’
    action:
    • service: media_player.turn_on
      entity_id: media_player.pioneer

Hope that helps!