5GHz doesn’t travel through walls and floors as well as 2.4GHz.
However if you connect via ethernet your two access points - it should work. My only concern is that the Apple stuff is quite old now and so not sure if its still being supported if there are bugs with it,
If they are ethernet wired - then ensure your access points can use 11n and 11ac and let them choose what is best for a client. Best not limit to just 11ac as this only works on 5GHz
That’s likely what I’m experiencing - thanks!
If I’m not wrong you’ve connected your ndx2 which is used only as transport directly to your dac.
I suppose that the internal NDX2 dac is an outstanding dac and it is perfectly integrated with the straming module internal bus. Do you think that external dac feeding connectionis on the same level of the internal one?
Strictly In terms of dac quality do you confirm that you prefer the chord hugo than the internal one?
Thanks a lot
Yes, other than different interfacing techniques and protocols are used. Internally i2s is used, externally SPDIF is used.
Ermm… yes, otherwise I guess I wouldn’t do it. If you search back over the years you can read my views on Hugo vs various Naim PCM1704K implementations as well.
Hi Simon,
Just to be sure: when you write:
“ Yes they need to be connected to the same network as the router - so either via the router’s LAN switch ports (they often have four such ports) or via a separate switch which in itself is connected to a router LAN switchport.
They don’t have to be that close to each other - though will depend on the design and construction type of your house - you may find 10 to 20 metres apart is fine. ”
… this means you have to use 10 to 20 meter ethernet cables from the router to each access point? Isn’t that a lot of cable (thick) to go through the house? How do you manage this practically?
Thanks a lot!
Hi Mr.M, thanks as this is very interesting. What do you think it means for the streamers like nd555 who do not have the wifi 6 or 7 hardware…will it be possible to “upgrade” them? Will they be able to benefit of the improved home networks although their receiving end is on the older technology?
I route the wiring like mains wiring… in walls, skirting boards etc.
I try and Ethernet Wiring needs to be done properly… certainly if you want it to work properly and/or support Wi-fi properly… certainly if you are using to network connect your Naim streamer.
There is some wiring I use that is flat cabling that is routed under the carpet…
Several of my Ethernet cable runs are 20 to 30 metres long… as long as they less than 100 metres it’s fine.
Good luck, if you get this done properly you are unlikely to regret it… and you then can forget it about it.
I don’t think you are alone, I suspect a lot of people have sub optimal home networks and Wi-fi probably suitable for undemanding applications only… a bit of care and consideration transforms them into something that is useful, reliable and dependable.
Give me half an hour and I’ll give you a proper answer 
Bathtime and Gruffalo reading done!
A really good starting point for you to help to develop your understanding all in to one place is the Wi-Fi Alliance.
They have a comprehensive section that summaries the technology in a clear and straightforward to understand way.
Most of the time Wi-Fi is literally an invisible technology, once you’ve connected to a network, at home or work or in a coffee shop it’s there and just works, great no problem!
The issue now being that over time, more and more things have come to rely on Wi-Fi to even be functional including voice assistants, door bells, smoke alarms, lighting, our TV, our Hi-Fi and, well you see the point!
Additional to more traditional devices like Laptops and phones you have an ever increasing amount of things that have been given some degree of compute power and connectivity and are often lumped together under the name IoT or Internet of Things, these can be very simple devices maybe measuring energy use, light intensity, air temperature or a persons vitals and so on.
All this demand for connectivity over Wi-Fi pushes the network to the limits of it’s design and at times pushes it beyond that meaning services are compromised due to too much demand for “air time” and not enough time or space to service those clients needs.
You also have the very real challenge of ensuring consistent service across your whole house, which could be spread out vertically and horizontally, be made of many different building materials and have other sources of interference that the Wi-Fi network is competing with as it attempts to transmit and receive data.
Till quite recently it was common to have a single Access Point which regardless of where your Wi-Fi clients were located, they would all associate with that single device and share their needs amongst each other, waiting in turn to send data and be sent data.
The main problem with this is that the more obstacles there are between you and the Access Point and the further away you are from it the harder it is to get data back and forth till eventually the signal strength is so weak you can’t send or receive anything and eventually disconnect. There is a graceful degradation of service based on signal strength however.
So this has led to a number of enhancements to mitigate some of the more common issues associated with rate(speed) and reach(distance between client and Access Point)
One solution is to bring the clients closer to the Access Point by adding more Access Points, but then you’ll want to only “see” one network, “Bob’s Home” as an example. If you add more Access Points you don’t want to end up with Bob’s Home 1,2 and 3. So those AP’s need to be enabled to work together so that as clients request connectivity and services the AP can make decisions on behalf of the clients to ensure they get the best service, strongest signal or point of least congestion as examples.
They’ll also want to be able to allow for users to switch between AP’s seamlessly as you walk around your home on a Skype call or turn your lights on.
If a lot of clients need data concurrently they’ll need to support multiple users with multiple inputs and multiple outputs, which is MU-MIMO for short.
Over time the efficiency of how the available unlicensed spectrum in each country is utilised has decreased as more and more AP’s overlap and try to fairly use the same narrow bands of frequencies, so different modulation schemes were utilised as equipment became more powerful and able to take advantage of complex error correction algorithms.
The number of antennas has also increased to be able to transmit and receive in parallel to many clients and ensure throughput is optimised.
You can indeed get a lot from Access Point products based on Wi-Fi 5 however having a Wi-Fi 6 Access Point or multiple Access Points is not only backwards compatible with existing Wi-Fi 4 and Wi-Fi 5 clients but enables a number of features not supported on any generation of Wi-Fi previous to it.
If you have a large home Wi-Fi 6 supports MU-MIMO on both 2.4GHz and 5 GHz bands, it has much better interoperability between vendors, actually an area that has historically caused a lot of issues. It supports increased intelligence and machine learning capability where multiple AP’s need to make service decisions in real time for clients to minimise throughput or connectivity issues. It allows for a mixed of Wired and Wireless backhaul between AP’s and the Router and it allows for a network orchestrator/controller to run on the local network to provide features to help manage traffic with greater granularity.
If you are keen to explore the improvements it can bring I’d encourage you to do some background reading on Wi-Fi 6 in particular and try out some Access Points that support it.
If you can hard wire each AP back to a switch or to your router thats ideal however if for practical reasons that’s not sensible for you then they can backhaul using a separate dedicated Wi-Fi radio if needed. Having AP’s too close together can also be counter productive as you could then find clients either being sticky to one of the AP’s or worse bouncing back and forth between them as the means by which the best choice of AP is determined become harder to calculate.
You can also look at ceiling mount AP’s which can be powered over one power/data connection using a standard Ethernet cable using Power over Ethernet (PoE) which would require a switch that supported that, perhaps a bit of a stretch but making you aware of it as it’s quite common in Enterprise installations.
Start with some background reading perhaps and go find some products then we can take a look and discuss their features, benefits, shortcomings and suitability to your needs.
Bit of a brain dump, hopefully of some use and interest anyway!
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Thanks. Very helpful. Somehow in my mind the ethernet cabling always had to be 1-2 meters, I had not envisaged such long distances were possible…But in that case what ethernet cable are you using? I do not think that for instance audioquest proposes this sort of length (20 m?)
Also as I mentioned in my other post after some adjustments my measured internet speed in the living room is 550 MBps upload and 440 download…should this not be more than sufficient to ensure optimal performance from the nd555? In this case I might not need the ethernet cabling?
Hi and thanks again. My week end is getting busier now. However I have still one thought because I feel the starting point is missing as we climb up the scales of wifi up to 6.
What is the appropriate level of wi-fi speed for the nd555? This should maybe help to then design the solution.
This morning early, after having removed my Netgear “Mesh extender” (good riddance?) and also moved my router closer to the living room, I have now measured my wifi speed in the living room: 550 MBps download and 440 MBps upload; it is high because I have a fiber access. In fact probably my extender was slowing my speed…I was in a rush when I set it up didn’t check.
So what I’m thinking now is: these are very high speeds, maybe comparable or even superior to what ethernet connections in other locations can deliver? So maybe I do not really need ethernet after all? Unless the issue is the stability and my speed can vary greatly (but what is the variation margin in general, could it drop below the optimal level for the nd…?)
Anyway I now need to do the listening test tonight when I’m back home…
Thanks for sharing your thoughts, I really appreciate
Firstly the speeds you are quoting are an indication of the speed between you and a speedtest server on the Internet.
They are just a guide as to what your connection is capable of in terms of bandwidth under specific test conditions.
The default behaviour is to find the test server closest to you to give the best result, it can be useful to test something further away however like California or Japan as random examples to compare not just speed/bandwidth but ping and jitter times.
In your case you have a very good connection with no issues with respect to bandwidth and fibre connections tend to handle fluctuations in demands on your service providers network relatively well.
The amount of bandwidth your ND555 actually needs is a tiny percentage of what your connection between it and servers on the Internet it is receiving data from actually require, however the connection between your ND555 and lets say Tidal is shared between multiple users as their data ebbs and flows firstly through your service providers core network and then peering with other networks and off in to the backbone of the Internet that connects users at a country and international level.
Once your data is onto the fibre access network it is out of your direct control and managed in the main using “best effort” methods to get it delivered to its destination, your data enters a queue and is processed on a first come basis, this happens to all intents and purposes instantaneously and even at times of peak demand, traffic congestion is managed by your provider using accepted standard practices for handling very large volumes of data.
You may find some priority or express lanes for data but these are usually reserved for essential services or ones you pay for like telephony and TV as obvious examples, they get to jump the queue by default but your audio streaming data, even though it’s in the regular lane with all the other data, is delivered using protocols that allow for the uncertainty of the network transporting them. An example of this would be HLS - HTTP Live Streaming. This streaming protocol allows a file to adapt to variable conditions between the client and the network, so if you were watching something on YouTube on a train journey and the quality seemed to be improving and deteriorating, whilst still not stopping playback, that’s HLS and it’s ability to adapt to different quality versions of the same content at different bitrates, usually without playback stopping, a graceful degradation.
You fibre connection is fixed as is the location of your ND555 so you have defined behaviours on your connection however your Wi-Fi network which allows you to connect your ND555 to your fibre providers network is something that is not only under your direct control but also environment specific so I could setup identical hardware in my home and it would work differently to the way it works in your home.
So this leads us to asking what are the important criteria for your streamer to get the best out of the connection between it and the rest of the world.
Naim designed the ND range to be flexible and inclusive, not only does it have a wired electrical Ethernet connection but also Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radios. It’s been built using radios that encompass technology up to what was generally available at the time it was launched and in to volume manufacturing. The Wi-Fi radio has 2 antennas which means it can be connected to 2 spatial streams from your Access Point at the same time for either receiving or transmitting data.
Here’s a chart that helps to visualise what the channels and spatial streams (these are the frequency bands your clients connect to) are able to support on the 5GHz band in Wi-Fi 5 (ac)
If you pan out further and look at the wider spectrum as we move towards Wi-Fi 6E you see how those new versions look to add capacity and give more spectrum to shorter range devices and at higher frequencies for connectivity within the same room and without material obstacles.
Another important development is the move from QAM to OFDMA modulation, in simple terms this allows the available spectrum to be sliced up with much higher granularity as you manage frequency use/allocation over time.
This means that regardless of the capability of the clients, to your point about suitability of your ND555 as a client in a Wi-Fi 6 capable network, the Access Point is using the available spectrum more efficiently to improve capacity and to mitigate congestion as required.
Here’s a good visualisation of what OFDMA helps with in terms of frequency/time
So in fact bandwidth isn’t the issue, never was, your main enemies are jitter and latency as your ND depends on a steady stream of data to keep its buffer full to then be passed on to the DAC or digital output for conversion back to an analogue signal.
Many of the common problems associated with Wi-Fi vs a wired Ethernet connection correlate to how the spectrum is utilised and how you handle the limitations implied with respect to rate/reach, namely the more obstacles and distance between radios the more signal loss/noise to mitigate and the more challenging it is to allocate transmit/receive time slots fairly between competing clients.
Wi-Fi 6 is not a magical panacea but it does make fundamental changes to the design of Wi-Fi and how it is characterised to mitigate many of the common problems identified with previous generations and it does so whilst remaining backwards compatible with previous generations so your Wi-Fi 5 ND555 will work just fine but also be joining a network that is more efficient, intelligent and scalable for future bandwidth and client needs.
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Hi, I use regular Cat5e cable.
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But remember channel width is dependent on the width of your neighbouring networks… you will need to use the channel that fits with everyone else or have high interference and retry.
If you are ‘green field’ then yes it is best to use the widest channels possible… but for many they will have neighbouring SSIDs.
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I’d need to check what ISM U-NII bands would relate specifically to South Korea where @Nestor_Burma is located but my expectation there would be his equipment would attempt to use U-NII Band 1 and as required utilise UNII-2 if band congestion warranted it.
You also have beam forming support on the antenna array in the AP in better designed products which helps with that and allows for better handling of transmit power levels.
Hi Mr. M many thanks again for this very instructive and clear explanation: so helpful, especially since due to language difference it is very difficult for me to get much advice!
I will look into purchasing a wifi6 router to replace my present one. One question is since I’m living in an apartment, and my connection speeds as measured seem quite good, a router should suffice, no need for a “mesh router” (2 boxes). Actually the only reason a mesh router could be considered would be that by locating the extra box close to my nd555 I could then connect the mesh extender (which is linked to the router by wi fi) to the nd… by ethernet cable (instead of wifi). The question then is whether this “last meter ethernet” into the nd555 makes any positive difference to the sound vs direct wifi?
The reason I’m focusing on wifi is that being in a rented apartment I can not “build” the ethernet cables into the walls…
Hi Simon, thanks!
So how do I select the best channels, are they ways to get this information from my router?
Whenever I have tried to select channels myself, I have found that either it causes problem, or at best, it makes no difference, so I leave the router to make its own selection.
Often in consumer equipment this is set by your Wi-fi router and are not configurable. For more configurable Wi-fi access points channel width for each frequency is an option.
In short wider channels can provide larger throughput, but are more prone to interference and so less throughput, so there is a balance to be struck.