To extend Ethernet to remote location, are Powerline extenders or Mesh systems better?

@ericsch Hi, sorry for the delayed response. We were off visiting her family for the holiday.

Yes, I use a Conrad Johnson Premier 6 pre-preamplifier. If you Google for it the pdf is available on their website. It's quite sensitive to RF and when I switched it on, it would send a fairly horrible noise downstream! Remember the coded transmissions Jeff Goldblum discovered in "Independence Day"? :) I tried moving the node as far as I could within the cabinet but it didn't matter. Still noisy. So I installed the node in a book case that doubles as LP storage that is about 15' away and ran a good quality Cat8 cable from it to the Node2i.

The base/Main node is upstairs next to the cable modem so the mesh network is providing excellent throughput all the way downstairs to the node in the living room. And as the remote node is hardwired to the Node2i, I get excellent performance.

A happy side benefit is that my Green Mountain Grill smoker with wifi now gets better signal outside too. LOL

Feel free to message me directly if you have any questions.

Happy listening!

Assuming your have Coax wired through your house you could also consider using a MoCA network.   I switched from Powerline to a MoCA 2.0 network and the frequent Roon hangs and random streaming skips went away.

I have Verizon Fios and TiVo and they both rely on MoCA and I noticed my TiVo streaming worked much better when I had it MoCA enabled vs its Ethernet setting (using Powerline).   So I purchased a couple of MoCA 2.0 adapters (e.g. https://www.actiontec.com//products/ecb6200/) and have been very happy with their performance for music streaming including many hi-rez files stored on my NAS two stories away from my dedicated listening room.

Cheers

Almost 30 years experience as a network architect for Very Large Network company.

Avoid network extenders - they do extend range but at a cost of 50% of your throughput. As you add devices, this catches up with you and performance and reliability degrades rapidly.

Mesh routers are vastly preferable as they seek the hub with the strongest signal and lightest load.

As Wifi 6 is adopted, its improved parallelism will support more devices and higher throughputs

The best mesh implementations use a wired backhaul to the main hub and 3 wireless channels (not 3 ip subnets).  

In the context of a domestic LAN, issues of jitter and latency are not meaningful, although packet drops are sumptomatic of range and load limits, as well as defective infrastructure, bad cables or connectors.

In short, nothing an extender does ultimately helps SQ. Everything a mesh router and Wi-Fi 6 do can help it. 

To panzrwagon

Your input and expertise is helpful. Do you have a point of view on Ethernet Over Powerline systems, and whether that technology, even if it passes the network signal well, will add noise onto the AC line that hifi gear and related power conditioners will fail to properly filter out? 

Also is it fair to assume EoP will have superior speed over mesh and wifi extenders as the signal never goes through the air?