gigital copyright 2024
It's your streamer, not your modem
So many discussions I've seen lately have been about upgrading Internet devices, especially the modems and routers to get the best possible audio. Audiogoners are talking about installing 10 GigE (10 Gigabits per second) cable for signals that barely need 10 megabits per second. Three full orders of magnitude more bandwidth than required by hi resolution audio. (192 k/24 bit)
I've also seen discussions about home Internet getting a little higher latency and jitter.
None of this should matter with a decent streamer. Let me give you an example. Because my work requires me to be online with high reliability I have two different Internet providers and a switch that detects failure in one and switches me to another.
It takes the switch approximately 40 seconds to detect the Internet is down and fail over to the other. 40 seconds. 40,000 milliseconds. For this testing I shut the modem off. In that moment, for the next 40 seconds, I had no working Internet. Then my back-up 5G Internet took over. About 3 minutes after that my primary Internet's modem has rebooted and my router has recognized it as available and switched back over.
During the testing I coincidentally had Roon playing a random Jazz selection.
Not once did my audio stop. Not even a hiccup.
Why? Buffering. Roon had gotten the entire song and doled it out to my end point a little at a time.
Point is, modem quality, router quality, switches, and Ethernet cables don't matter that much. What does is the size of the buffer and the effectiveness of the anti-jitter circuitry in the DAC.
I do by the way recommend shielded cables, Ethernet isolators and gas discharge surge protectors, but sweat a modem or router? Not me.
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- 30 posts total
@erik_squires to confirm your post. I have had a lot of internet problems lately. Streaming of TV stopping. Computers disconnecting. lots of latency and intermittent service. Through it all I've been very impressed that my music just kept playing. A couple of times it did shut down but it just stopped and I restarted it. Much, much better performance that my other internet components. For info: Streamer Grimm MU1. Roon. Jerry |
Thanks, @carlsbad2 I’m not saying it’s NEVER the Internet, at all. The performance of a lousy Internet with live streams ( hi Jazz FM 91 Toronto! ) is quite different. Last year it would run for like an hour before quitting. At the same time my browser would also stop responding. That was before I had Internet fail over. My network provider has a multitude of ways it fails, and that’s why I’ve implemented a hot-fail over solution with ongoing monitoring. Also, for whatever reason, about 2/3rds of the time when I have an Internet outage it requires a modem reset because it just won't come back on it's own. Now, will this modem reset work, or am I going to have to wait 6 hours until it does? I don't know, but that's what my automation is for. I am saying that the overall quality of your devices in the home or looking for 1 Gig data plans isn’t going to help you. |
- 30 posts total