2. digital
  3. 165682-114769

Minimum Broadband Speed Necessary For Uninterrupted Qobuz and/or Tidal Listening?

I live in a sparsely populated rural area with only a few Internet providers. I currently have 25Mb DSL from CenturyLink (previously Sprint landline) and I subscribe to both Qobuz and Tidal. My actual DSL speed varies from about 18Mb up to 25Mb and this can vary during the day. My hardware includes a Bluesound Node 2i connected by a short Ethernet cable (Not using a wireless connection) to my CenturyLink DSL router.

I can rarely listen for more than 20 minutes or so without experiencing what I would deem dropouts in either the Qobuz or Tidal music stream, or the stream will simply freeze and I have to hit the “play” icon to re-start the music stream. I do seem to suffer a few more problems listening to Qobuz than Tidal, and I attribute this to Qobuz’s multiple higher resolution offerings (higher resolution than Redbook CD) vs, the MQA offerings from Tidal which I believe use a bit less bandwidth than Quobuz’s higher resolution offerings.

I recently started listening to the four lossless radio streams with MQA encoding now offered by Radio Paradise, and interestingly enough I DO NOT have these dropouts and/or music freezes with the Radio Paradise streams. And the MQA feeds from Radio Paradise are always glitch-free compared to Tidal and Qobuz.

These dropouts/freezes suggest my CenturyLink 25Mb DSL speed is not enough for either Qobuz and Tidal and that I need to purchase more bandwidth. 25Mb is CenturyLink’s maximum speed in my area, but I can get fibre connectivity in increments ranging from 45Mb up to 1Gb and cable connectivity in increments ranging from 50Mb up to 1,5Gb, and StarLink satellite service from Space X at 70Mb ($100/month, no data cap) plus $600 for satellite equipment is now available in my area.

I’m interested in your thoughts regarding the minimum broadband speed I need, and whether I should select cable or fibre to upgrade to?
128x128vinyl_rules
gdnrbob
4,450 posts
 
I think the bottleneck is streaming both movies and music, especially so given your network speed.
Are you using wired or wireless streaming?
B
ausaudio
90 posts
 
24/192 Flac Encoded, 50% compression efficiency, 25% overhead, and you are looking at 5-6 megabits/second.

If you go into your router, you may be able to give priority to your audio device so it gets bandwidth before anything else.
sudharl
31 posts
 
It might be worth to try AC router instead of N.
p05129
501 posts
 
It’s not your router or anything inside your house, it’s the copper network. Copper is shared with all your neighbors and that’s why your speed varies. Also with copper, your download speeds are 10x faster than your upload speed. Also copper is noisy. Get fiber if you can, you will get a clean, stable, and no dropouts. With 1G fiber, I get 980Mb up and down, if you get 100M fiber, you would get almost 100Mb up and down. Fiber is also cheap, I pay less than $50 a month for 1Gb fiber
jrh1970
3 posts
 
One more thought.  Are you both using the same 2 GHZ wifi channel, assuming you are operating on WiFi?   If so, could one of you move to a 5 GHz channel to gain some frequency diversity and the higher bandwidth at 5 GHz?
More to discover