Wi-Fi Fidelity?

Some interesting comments on wi-fi from Ayre's Charles Hansen in this Positive Feedback feature, in his answer to question 6:

http://www.positive-feedback.com/Issue41/ca_hansen.htm

Strange food for thought!

Wi-Fi doesn't degrade the signal, just make sure you have a strong wifi signal. The dropouts would be very annoying.

Wi-Fi connections are not directly involved in the Digital to analog conversion process and therefore do not affect the sound.

A Wifi connection is just a means of feeding the bits to another device or devices that provide the clock and DAC needed to perform the actual conversion to analog sound.

You can get dropouts though if the Wifi signal is too weak or obstructed because this will prevent the bits from being fed into the conversion process fast enough to keep the sound going.

As already mentioned, the drop outs can be very annoying, and hard to pinpoint the cause. If you are using a Mac, Leopard doesn't support airtunes any more either. I use a usb from my Macbook to a Bel Canto Dac3. Because the dac is 30 ft from the computer I have to use a powered usb cable which works great. Bel Canto said this is much better then a 30ft toslink cable. I tried both and agree. So it wouldn't hurt to ask the manufacturer of your dac. I know Bel Canto has a new USB link product which is supposed to sound better, but it is 500 bucks and I haven't heard any feedback yet. Drop outs really suck.

Ablang,

if you live in a HighRise, how do you tell all your neighbors to unplug there WIFIs. I dont think you can notice WIFI disturbance I think the AC is a bigger issue.