I have owned my ND5XS for just over a year now. It worked great the first year, but is now dropping the connection over Wifi. It displays Connection Lost on the screen or something like that. It will stay connected anywhere from an hour to a day and a half. I have tried rebooting the cable modem and router and it makes no difference. I have an iPhone, iPad, and two laptops that are on continuously that use the same network and never lose connection. The signal strength is excellent since itās only about 10 feet from the router through a wall, and I live in an isolated area.
The only change at the year point was buying the new iPhone. Thinking it was that, I turned it off completely. That did not solve the problem.
How do you go about diagnosing this? Are there any kind of logs in the player?
Can you give me a few more details about your network please? Is the router the only wifi access point, are you using DHCP throughout? If so, do you know what your IP address lease time is set to?
When your ND5 disconnects, what do you have to do to make it reconnect? Or does it reconnect automatically?
Yes router is the only Wifi access point. It is an Apple Exreme. I use DHCP and I changed the lease time from 1 day to 1 week. That made no difference.
When it disconnects, I either have to reboot the ND5, or press the center button. Then it says to press it again to reconnect. That has worked. It never reconnects automatically.
If you searched āTidalā on the forums. Youāll see that there is this discussion topic now that may help to solve your problem. Iāve also gave some inputs myself. Good to have a read, always new things to learn.
wifi doesnāt really go through wallsā¦ ISTR a single brick wall knocks the wifi (2.4GHz) down by about 6dBiā¦ A double brick wall would be 12dBi. Heck in my house it wonāt even go through a 4" breezeblock - good old fashioned breezeblock made from slag. If this is 5GHz then itās even worse with more loss and also, typically, lower wifi power (even though the Ofcom/EU rules permit more power with 5GHz wifi, most devices canāt deliver).
So faced with the fact that walls are a no-no the way wifi propagates is reflection and scatter through doors and windows (and normally floors). As such the position of the router and the receiver (client) can change things a heck of a lot. e.g. my house, stood in the kitchen so I can see the router through the doorway and wifi is fine. Step 2 feet to the right, no line of site, and itās terrible. I have a Roberts internet radio in the kitchen. Itās sat on a work top. Changing the position just 6 inches makes the difference between working and not. SWMBO keeps on pushing it to the left on the worktop, not a lot, just 6 inches. Doesnāt work. Iāve told her again and again to stop moving it!
It getās even more complicated when you look at antenna types/size/location. Everyone thinks a super high gain antenna is the answerā¦ wrong! Back to the above, if the signal is getting to the client by reflection/scattering then a higher gain antenna can make things worse. Higher gain means a tighter beamā¦ so the antenna is looking in just one specific direction. If the signal is scattering all round then thatās worse with an antenna with a restricted angle of view. So the antenna in a phone is typically VERY low gain (possibly 0dBi) so looking through 360 degrees in all planes (like a sphere). The flagellaform antenna normally found on the router and, for example, on my NDX, are 360 degrees in the horizontal plane but restricted in the verticalā¦ a bit like a doughnut shape. The long-and-short of it is if it works for an i that doesnāt infer it will work for a different product.
Iāll be honest I hate wifi because of itās unpredictability and itās very hard to explain/convince the laymen that itās not as good as the stupid TV adverts would have you believe.
My AirPort Express shows the ND5 with an RSSI of -40dbm when itās connected. So Iām going to guess that this is some kind of interference that the Naim canāt handle. Again, every other device that I use I connect with Wifi, and they donāt have a problem. Even from different parts of the house.
The thing drives me crazy is that it was working fine for a year, and now the problems have started. I donāt know if itās a hardware fault in the ND5 or not. I wish there were some kind of logs in the ND5 to help diagnose why it is losing connection.
It would be very painful to run a hard line to the streamer. Thatās the main reason why I bought this product. To be able to connect wirelessly and not have to cut holes in my walls.
I read some of the Tidal thread that was mentioned, but that doesnāt apply since Iām not going outside my network. I guess upgrading to 4.7 wouldnāt help either since it was just Tidal fixes. Iām currently at 4.6.
I have an Airport Extreme and a Time Capsule, and have found them increasingly unstable for Wifi connections. My Macbook pro disconnects numerous times a day, but has no issues with Wifi connections elsewhere. I plan to replace them both with a Mesh Wifi network. I just donāt know yet which system I plan to get.
I have my ND5 XS hardwired with Cat6 ethernet since I get dropouts trying to stream 24/192 files over Wifi from my NAS.
Iām afraid I donāt have any experience with Apple products.
Does your router receive & update itās firmware automatically? If so, can you see when it was updated & connect this with when the problem started pehaps?
I donāt know if you were referring to me, so Iāll just say my issues started when I got the latest gen Macbook Pro last August, and not timed with any firmware update.
Apple has essentially abandoned their Airport product line, so I plan to just move on. Mine are a bit long in the tooth and donāt support the latest Wifi standards anyway.
Very odd - the infrastructure is stable. Iām afraid itās the old ND platform that has problems with wireless connectivity.
Thre questions / suggestions:
Is your Airport Extreme assigning the IP addresses? Is it the ISP router?
Have you tried power-cycling all network components?
Could you run an experiment and connect your streamer with a long Ethernet cable? Just run it on the floors. i just would like to see if tis is really a wieless problem or an infrastructure problem.
This kind of smacks of a signal strength issue - perhaps something has changed within your local environment which maybe effecting it?
Have a good inspection of the Wifi aerial & the gold connector, sometimes if the connector has worked loose in the chassis, keen fitting of the aerial can twist the entire mounting & damage the delicate co-ax inside the unit.
You could also try changing the wifi channel on the router.
Heck those modern ābreezblocksā (aerated cement blocks) are so weedy you can see light through them let alone wifi! Impossible to fix a shelf to themā¦ itāll fall down after a week. Further, they are so adsorbent of water that builders have issues with mortarā¦ they suck the water out of the mix so you end up with weak and flaky mortar. btdt! We had some bulding work done a few years ago and he was saying how itās now āthe rulesā you canāt use normal breezeblocks above one storey because of risk if you drop oneā¦ heavy. He hated them. Anyway back to the thread.
If there isnāt line of sight then the wifi propagation is by reflection and scattering. Even the slightest change in the physical environment can change thingsā¦ see my post about moving a radio 6 inches can change things.
I have no idea what breezeblock is. If itās what we call cinder blocks or just concrete bock, I assure you that none of that stuff is in my home. Itās just two pieces of Sheetrock (and wood studs) between the two antennas.
Iām experimenting with antenna orientation right now. They usually show the Naim antennas straight up. I removed the Bluetooth one and I angled the WiFi one down to about 90 degrees. It has stayed connected for 1 1/2 days now, a new short term record. Weāll see how long it lasts.
I do have a weather station that is beaming data to that room. That may be the source of interference. But it has been there all along, so donāt know why it would suddenly cause problems. Just lucky maybe?
Depends upon the age of the homeā¦ Most new builds are a brick outer skin and cinder block internal skin. It was also popular for interior walls before the prevalence of stud/drywalls. Every house weāve ever owned has had some in itā¦ even our first house, a 1950ās council house had some. Now we divert into a conversation about building practices over the last 100 years
Anywayā¦ dry-lined stud walls. One of the houses weāve owned was barrett. Now these are notorious (like all new builds nowadays) for all the internal walls being all stud work. So youād think wifi would have now issuesā¦ Nope! We found out that barrett had used foil backed plaster board on all the walls and ceilings! Possibly for heat or perhaps fire pevention anyway the Wifi was rubbish!
