The room where I have my gear has some physical constraints that means my router and streamer are at opposite ends of the room with no practical way of hard-wiring (solid floor with original 1830’s parquet, exposed stone walls, variable ceiling heights, wife etc etc).
I’m therefore limited to using Wi-Fi or Ethernet over mains (EoM).
Question is, if I use the EoM route, do you think there would be any benefit in installing Catsnake cables between router and NAS and/or router to input side of the EoM unit, and/or from output side of EoM to streamer?
Ethernet over mains is very noisy at best. Is there any way of running an ethernet cable from the router to the other end of the room in small-ducting or alternatively can you take a feed from the router around the outside of the house and back into the other end of the room.
I would look at a decent Mesh WiFi setup with at least one of the units wired to your router. If properly set up it should provide reliable coverage. Most have Ethernet ports which can be used to connect devices that don’t have wireless connectivity too.
First of all I would try and get a wired solution. In my opinion a decent quality Ethernet cable ignoring any aspects supposedly relating to audio quality is all you need. As for wireless or Ethernet over mains, they are both very much second best but the ultimate decision comes to signal strength and the proximity of interference from other signals on similar channels. An unreliable or weak wireless signal would lead me to the Powerline option.
Do I need a mesh system if the router (BT Smart Hub 2) and the streamer (ND5 XS, shortly to be upgraded to an NDX2) are in the same room about 4m apart and in direct line of sight?
My BT SH2 worked perfectly into the NDX over wireless when temporally located in another room, it was about 6 or 8m & via two brick/block walls.
(it’s normally all ethernet in the same room as the SH2)
I must add the SH2 paired extender disc (the black one) makes an excellent whole house solution.
In your situation: just use WiFi and cable the NAS to the router (any decent Ethernet cable will do).
(No additional HW needed, no noise like with EoM, … should work fine.)
Unless there’s heavy interference from neighbors, you should be fine. Or if you have a super-heavy fish-aquarium in between full of water, or any metal-meshes.
I read the old streamers are not state of the art WiFi devices, but even they should do here. The NDX2 will be surely fine, judging from my Nova.
If you should encounter issues, you can look at the situation again.
Unfortunately running a cable from router to streamer is just not possible. At either ground or ceiling level it would mean crossing a doorway whichever way I take the cable and there are lots of corners and beams to negotiate (joys of living in a old pub I guess, room topography is fine for living in, not so good for networks )
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