Squeezebox Touch: jitter thru wi-fi?


I'm looking into a SB Touch to go with a non-dedicated PC, and to feed my preamp (so initially, I'll use the Touch's DAC).

Eventually I plan to buy an external DAC, and I'm interested in the asynch USB DACs, which are supposed to avoid jitter through that interface. There's a Touch tweak going around to turn the USB input into an output, so that would be a preferred way to connect to said DAC.

Now how about mistimmings in the data transfer (jitter) through my wi-fi from PC to Touch? Is that an issue?

Thanks!
lewinskih01
I use a Touch in my system wirelessly and never have dropouts, but I gnerally have a 90-95% signal strength at my listening position. By comparison, I also have a prior generation squeezebox (SB3) that has been heavily modified to improve the digital output and I find the unmodified Touch to be as good or better. I wouldn't worry about jitter with the Touch.
"Does that seem ok/bad/borderline?"

Well, my internal walls are drywall, not brick, so hard to say but I suspect brick would be more of an obstruction.

You should be able to see the "number of bars" or % connection strength on the computer used as music server.

Does Squeezebox provide a similar readout of signal strength? If so, that would be the way to tell.

I would say with wireless G if you fall below 80-90% signal strength in either connection to router (from server or from Squeezebox) that rebuffering delays are more likely using lossless files ripped from CD. I use lossless .wav format.

Higher rez files utilizing more data per second of music will up the ante further. I do not have any experience there I can relate.

Newer computers offer wireless N which has significantly higher bandwidth. Sam true of routers. I would expect newer networked music devices to follow suit also at some point at which time the issues with higher res files will be relieved somewhat.
Jitter is only an issue with the clock and S/PDIF output of the Touch, not the WiFi transfer. Only dropouts can occur with the WiFi interface. These are not jitter. Dropouts are rare and depend on the usage of your ethernet network.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio
Audioengr reminded me that a Wifi network is shared and used by all active devices connected to it. it is only dedicated to streaming audio from server to player if nobody else is using it for tasks that consume bandwidth (web browsing, file downloads, etc.). So concurrent usage for things other than streaming audio can cause delays/dropouts.

For example, I have two Roku players on two systems that conenct via wireless G to the same music server computer. Often if I play both at the same time with lossless CD .wav files, the dropouts/delays will occur regularly and become an annoyance. Less of a problem as I mentioned earlier for lossy or lower resolution files, like MP3.
The worse case for two channel spdif is 24bit at 192kHz.
24 bit data is transferred in 32bit packets (8 bit preamble).

32bit x 2channels x 192kHz = 12.3Mbps

802.11g runs at up to 54Mbps while 802.11n more than doubles it.