WiFi Extender and NDX2 and control app

The AC1900 arrived and installed without any problem. The sad news is that it won’t work. I assume my iPad has connected to the new, stronger, WiFi signal and it cannot see the NDX2.
If I unplug the AC1900 the iPad reverts to the old WiFi and finds the NDX2 straight away.
That’s a shame.
Edit:
Oh. It seems that’s only true if I omit the _EXT suffix. With the suffix it works! I don’t understand.

Any accidental chance you are creating a new network when you omit the suffix? Unlikely, I know… maybe double check the IP address your iPad gets when connecting with and without the _EXT suffix name??? Guessing and grasping at straws here.

The steel joist I’m not sure about… it shouldn’t interfere with wifi transmission in the room except maybe for a “shadowing” effect. So if it’s in line between you and your wifi source, maybe it’s an issue.

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I’m really not sure. At the moment I’m just pleased that it’s working.
Now I have to spend time listening to music to see if the new WiFi signal is consistent and it’s not some other, more devilish, problem.
Thank you for help.

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Are you sure it’s not just the iPad WiFi being flaky?
Do you get the same issues using anything else as control?

My iPad occasionally decides it doesn’t want to play nicely; a restart seems to bring it back.

I don’t think so as my iPhone will occasionally do the same (I don’t use it to control very often). Of course, it might be a general iDevice malaise.
I’m running the streamer/iPad on the WiFi extension now, so time will tell.

You could connect the ndx2 into the Ethernet socket on the tp WiFi thingy.

I had loads of problems with the Naim App losing connections to devices until I got a decent WiFi. I’d suggest you invest in a mesh network where you can add WiFi nodes until you have coverage throughout. This way you don’t have to worry about extenders which bring all sorts of problems. I installed Amazon Eero devices in mid 2020 and have had no problems since then. You may need more dependng upon house layout and wall type/thickness. The various nodes can connect to each other via WIFi or Ethernet and you only have one, easy to manage, network.

Unfortunately it’s in the wrong place.

I believe that Sky Q doesn’t always play nicely with OEM mesh networks.
Come June I will be ditching Sky after 20 years (don’t need it with so much streaming available) and also getting full fibre broadband. Then I might invest in a mesh network, although I should say that the WiFi in this house is very good, with this one notable exception.

There’s no reason it shouldn’t do. We have Sky Q and have no problems. However, it is connected a to a hardwired Ethernet port. However, you can connect it to an Ethernet port on a WiFi mesh node (the Eeros have two each).

When looking at networks, it pays to take a holistic approach. In the UK, most broadband providers limit each household to a single broadband connection, so that broadband has to serve a wide range of needs, including high res audio and video streaming, maybe gaming, hardwired and wi-fi connection to a broad variety of devices, some mobile, some with fixed location, some with ethernet and no wi-fi, some with 2.4GHz wi-fi and some with both 2.4 and 5GHz band capabilities. In order to achieve a smoothly functioning household, all these devices need to be considered in the network design. First things to bear in mind are network fundamentals……all wi-fi devices have 2.4mHz band so its by far the busiest. 2.4mHz has greater penetrative ability (walls, ceilings etc.) and better distance capabilities but has much lower speed than 5HGz., so if the broadband is already slow, the more devices it serves, the slower it becomes.
When encountered by a hi-fi in any area other than wireless networking, wi-fi is a form of RFI.
So when it comes to design, you have several considerations:
Devices to be connected
Speed requirements (hi-res streaming vs your fish tank pump)
Band availability
Mobile vs. static
Distance from wi-fi ‘radio source’
Signal strength throughout your residence
Available wiring and accessibility for cabling.
Potential RFI contamination of your hi-fi
Also other aspects very much worth bearing in mind if your design is supposed to achieve maximum SQ are:
network traffic volume. The more traffic, the more network cards, chips, processors and power supplies are engaged, the greater the amount of high-frequency noise generated, especially if there’s a lot of error correction and interrupts going on…. and HFN plays havoc with clocks, DACs and microcircuits. A good rule of thumb is, the closer you get to your hi-fi, the less traffic needs to be traversing the network. Ideally the entire hi-fi and most of its network should only be processing network traffic related to playing music. And ideally eVen that will be muted during music replay.
The other MAJOR consideration are network power supplies, because they, more than anything else are responsible for and strongly influencial in the final sound. The entire network is built on modulated DC from the power supplies and that DC has a very strong sonic identity that will generate most of the desirable characteristics of a ‘for music’ data stream.
The control of vibration in all network components ensures that the bit stream voltage structure is not compromised or in any way modulated by resonances in chips, crystals, transformers and connectors. The ‘quieter’ a network component is in terms of internal or external vibration, the better that component performs in terms of its sonic signature and influence.
So, bearing the above in mind, this is the network I constructed.

For mobile components like phones, iPads etc, I use 2.4GHz for its distance. I make sure that the distance is sufficient at all points by using strategically placed repeaters, which makes for a switching-free connection.
For remote components I use the same strategy and for local components I use the router’s wi-fi directly.
Which leaves streaming….video and music. Equally important, both sensitive to streaming quality and especially speed. Remember that for best quality I need to cut down network traffic as early as possible, so speed of the network is important not for streaming, but in order to have enough bandwidth for all the 2.4GHz components ! That’s where speed is important. You don’t want bottlenecks anywhere on your router. In fact the router operates best when it barely knows it has a load, so, I use a tri-band router with a total of 5400Mbps across 2 x 5GHz Bands (Audio & Video streaming) and a single 2.4MHz band (general network of household mobile and static devices)
My hi-fi is 15m remote and 1 floor up from my router, so I use a network bridge to collect the distance attenuated 5GHz signal and pass it along an ethernet cable to the first of 3 switches. The repeater only receives and transmits audio related traffic, so EMI is limited. The switches only receive audio specific traffic from the bridge, traffic that is free from any voltage contamination from preceding network and broadband components by virtue of its complete radio frequency voltage isolation (which is what wi-fi provides, so is quite desirable if done well.) The lack of network traffic in the switch directly influences the amount of noise produced when the switch is switching ports. Each switch includes some further isolation, some noise reduction, improvements in timing, improved power supplies and improved vibration isolation. This ‘improved’ signal is fed into a further switch with yet better specs.
I use specialist power supplies throughout, cables that were developed to sound exceptional in an audio setting, with all components isolated from vibration.
For me at least, the above has been a recipe to achieve what I consider to be a source of very beautiful, super involving, fully immersive music.

One other thing. If the network is laid out as a series of improvements, that is, the digital performance and set-up spec of each stage goes up in terms of quality i.e timing, noise, ps quality, clock specifications, vibration control/isolation then the structural quality of the network goes up in a compounding manner (better in
= better out) and this makes a big difference at the DAC for exactly the same reason; better in = better out. This is probably true for any circuit where music is the final product. Unproven, but likely😏 but certainly true for networks intended for music.
One final thing. The above is entirely scalable and a lot can be achieved without spending loads of dosh, just by taking a stepwise, analytical approach to figuring out your best network design that reduces your hi-fi network’s traffic to only the musically essential as early as possible in the process.

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Thank you for your hugely in-depth reply. I’ve read it a couple of times, understanding a little more each time. I must say that I could never see myself getting so involved with my network: once we have FTTP I’ll ditch Sky, install a mesh network and probably stop there. I live in a very old house and it’s a struggle accommodating today’s technologies. I like to spend the time enjoying the music.

An excellent reason to leave it on WiFi if ever I heard one… :wink:

By the way - my other half told me tonight that her iPad keeps dropping connectivity too. Android phone doesn’t seem affected. Perhaps it is an iThing issue!

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Your iPad vs Android is one reason I highlighted mobile devices. For example, if you have a 2 band router and your iPAD happens to be connected to the 5GHz band while your Android is connected to 2.4GHz, you’ll get far more dropouts on the iPAD. Left to their own devices (‘scuse the pun) many routers will auto switch between the 2 bands depending on signal strength and loading. This is fine for static devices but problematic for mobile

By default, your extender takes the same name as your router, with -EXT added.

Your problem is that you have a static device and a mobile device. The static device always stays with the same network connection, unless your router forces a change due to capacity, while the iPAD switches based on signal strength, sometimes connected to the extender and sometimes to the router. If both devices have the router name and the extender name as available networks, you should be golden, unless you go wandering around the house with the iPAD while connected to an app like WhatsApp or Skype

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That’s what I hoped for. In fact the streamer naturally stays connected to the router WiFi and the iPad seems to stay connected to whichever I have manually connected it to ( the _EXT extender WiFi). The iPad normally stays in the music room but if I take it into our bedroom (where the router WiFi is stronger than the extender WiFi) I would have liked it to change networks, but it doesn’t.

Hi there, you don’t always want it changing to the strongest channel because that would cause more frequent drop outs and reconnects. Ideally it should only switch when the signal is becoming too weak to ensure a proper connection.

If your streamer is always connected to your router, I would try moving the extender to another location outside the music room, because its adding no value in there and potentially contaminating the hi-fi with musically unrelated RFI

The disconnect only happens to the iPad in the music room. Everywhere else is solid, so it makes sense to have the extender in there. I’ve had no disconnects since using the extender, but it could still happen.

I do think there’s a lot of over-thinking here.

Sky Q generally plays fine and doesn’t cause any problems of this nature. There is a specific user case for mesh and Sky Q certainly struggles with mesh but then mesh is is often used as a proxy for “will just solve all your wi-fi problems” and used where it’s not needed at all. There as many threads on “mesh did not solve my issue” as there are on “mesh solved my issue”.

If there’s Sky Q in place and an ordinary Sky router then the 2 bands are merged and you would have to make a specific choice to go into your router settings, separate them and then connect the iPad to the 5Ghz band. Bearing that in mind I can’t see that it’s that.

Your next problem here is a user who understandably just wants the thing to work without necessarily having great technical knowledge.

What the user here is describing, to me, is the absolutely typical experience of simply being on the wrong channel.

Having had some power outages which reset lots of network stuff I was bemused when both the streamer and all our iOS devices played up. My streamer connects via a cheap extender which is a pain but I eventually got to the point where the streamer worked like a dream but the iPad and related apps were either very slow or constantly disconnecting. Lots of solutions offered. Mesh, different bridge, iPad exchange etc.

Actual solution was to work through the wi-fi channels and find one which got the streamer rock solid (in my case Channel 6) and then reset network settings on all household iOS devices. Worked instantly.

Everything has always been solid apart from the iPad (and sometimes iPhone) connection to the streamer. As it was an intermittent problem, it may be a little laborious discerning whether one wifi channel worked better than the others. But, of course, if that’s what it takes…
Everything has been 100% since the introduction of the wifi extender. Soon I will be replacing the Sky broadband with fttp broadband from another provider. It’ll be interesting to see what that throws up.