Thanks everyone for contributing in the discussion, I appreciate your help on this.
What I have concluded is that in my particular situation with approx 70Mbps data volume rate of Wifi this is adequate for streaming even high resolution music. There could be occasional audio dropouts using wifi during peak hours (which I have experienced) but there should no degradation of sound quality. Ethernet hard wire connection router to streamer is preferred by many to avoid this.
If you want to test this, but a very cheap, long Cat5e Ethernet cable, and run it loose from router to streamer. If that results in improved sound quality or reliability, you then have the option of installing a cable permanently. You may well decide itās unnecessary.
Thanks, yes I have one hid behind the settee as a fallback if needed but donāt want to install permanently if I can avoid it. I will use if when I get audio dropouts to verify this resolves it.
I have an airport express plugged into the router and another plugged into the Uniti Star. I have never worked out if this is better than using Wi-Fi from the router to the Star but the Star definitely connects quicker using this configuration rather than Wi-Fi. If anyone thinks this isnāt ideal I would be interested to hear but I do have loads of devices on the normal Wi-Fi so I figured it might be better. I canāt run an Ethernet cable from the router to the Star without a lot of issues.
Of course, if you just take the modem/router your ISP brought when they installed your broadband and try to base a music streaming system on what it delivers, youāre going to get below average performance in terms of both robustness and sound quality.
If youāre going to use wi-fi in the context of high resolution audio then it has to be purpose engineered with:
Sufficient bandwidth
Sufficient isolation
Traffic optimization
Adequate power supplies
Optimally screened cabling (no screen continuity between components).
Optimally selected components
A degree of vibration isolation, especially for oscillators (clocks)
When IT experts look at digital, all they consider is the bitstream integrity but in audio, the āfabricā of the bitstream is basically what most influences sound quality. A bit perfect stream will not deliver perfect sounding music if thereās a lot of jitter, incoming noise and poor DC delivery associated with the production of that stream. For example, using any router based on the Intel Puma chip set is going to result in sub-optimal performance vs a router utilising the far better Broadcom chipset.
Wi-fi can be used to create state of the art music, but it needs to also be state of the art wi-fi. Personally I use a 3 band high performance router with one 5GHz band dedicated solely to audio. The router feeds an optimal strength wi-fi signal to an ethernet bridge, both powered by SoTA linear power supplies. The bridge is some distance from the system and is followed by an optimally powered switch, which cleans and retimes the data stream, which is conducted to the system via copper ethernet cable.
The more you chose to optimize your data stream delivery system, the better your sound quality will become and wi-fi is no limitation whatsoever as long as its done properly.
This simply isnāt true.
There is no jitter on Ethernet.
@Blackmorec Not my experience at all. Yes, you need a decent signal to reach your streamer to make streaming over wifi stable and reliable, but the idea that a fancy router will improve sound quality is nonsense IMHO. For many people, me included, the standard router supplied by their internet provider gives a stable signal that works perfectly for streaming. Those in older or larger houses may need to buy a more powerful router to get a stable signal to reach across their property, but the idea that this improves SQ is just fanciful.
100%, these so called quality āroutersā are much like boutique cables, money for nothing;
one exception is they normally have more ability to change settings & tuning, maybe thats what you pay for & has some benefit, but also can be a bad thing in the wrong hands.
I donāt agree about a more powerful wireless hub, they are limited by power radiation regulations. The answer for larger, multi storied and solid walled interiors is one or more extenders. Nothing better IMO (if youāre in UK) is the BT SmartHub-2 with a Wi-Fi Disc (the black disc) its specifically designed to partner/handshake/talk to the SmartHub-2
Except of course if the wifi channels are congested in a densely populated area during peak hours when everyone comes home and starts Netflixing or whatever. Probably not much of an issue in a detached house, but can be a problem in apartment buildings - I donāt know what living situation the OP has.
Of course, one can obtain all of the benefits of wired Ethernet (rock solid connectivity, no interference from other RF sources) with none of the potential negatives (induced RF interference in the Ethernet cable, ground loops) by using optical fiber from the network switch to their system.
Edwardian brick terrace
Not being an expert on British building styles, pictures on Google tell me that it doesnāt look like people stacked upon people, so the density of wifi networks is probably a medium between detached houses and apartment buildings, and I would expect it to be non-critical with a reasonable wifi setup.
To be honest there is a lot of jumbo jumbo spoken about this question in certain audiophile communities. Wifi works in the vast majority of cases just fine and the resultant audio sounds fantastic and it is often the simplest to hook upā¦ and modern wifi protocols are more than capable in handling the rather benign demands of home audio streaming. Ethernet is good for fixed or static setups such that it doesnāt add load to your WLAN but does require dedicated wiring and a suitable switch port.
Now here are the variablesā¦. Ethernet cables depending on what they are connected to are rather good electrical noise conductors, and wifi like a galvanic isolator can remove thisā¦ kind of like connecting with fibre.
Some wifi setups are poor with a single access point serving a whole house, in such scenarios you may find the wifi not a great network medium as it may suffer with congestion. Multiple access points like an ESSID or mesh setup is preferable.
Some streamer implementations might have a poor wifi or Ethernet implementation, such that for either one side effects are created affecting audio performance, ie wifi might sound poor, or Ethernet sounds less good than wifi.
All things being equal wifi should work fine and sound good whilst offering flexibility on placement etc ā¦ however take the variable considerations into mindā¦ and then itās a case of suck it and see to find which one you prefer.
Alternatively, you can access BTās speed test via a browser at:
https://speedtest.btwholesale.com/
Selecting āAdditional Diagnosticā once the initial speed test has completed will give maximum line speed. (In my experience other speed test sites give higher readings than BT.)
Further detailed information about line capacities can be found at:
I get impossible numbers using that BT test, 126Mb/s downlink for e.g.
The BT app test gives similar numbers to the various www tests.
Whatever, Iām not that bothered, with a rock solid service that aināt broke, not much need for āspeedā checks.
Thatās not my experience, although Iām on FTTC. I agree re ārock solid serviceā, however the test is a sure fire way of diagnosing line issues in my experience.
In respect of ethernet vs wi-fi, Iāve found the latter to be rock solid using a Ubiquiti Dream Machine and Nano-HD access point which are more than capable of reliably streaming 4k video to say nothing of CD quality audio. Iām yet to try Qobuz, but I suspect that will be reliable too - having said that I plan to install a PoE switch using Cat 6 at some point in the future.
Same for me, my cabinet is aprx 250m distant
I tried the BT Wholesale test again yesterday, numbers all over the place, 120Mb, 192Mb & 208Mb. This morning Iām getting a consistent & believable number around 73Mb uplink & 18Mb downlink, but Ping numbers are not believable.
Anyhow, like I said, I really have no need to play with speed tests, Iāll just stick with the BT app on iPad and Speedtest.net on Windows
I would not believe them.
I ran a web-based speedtest.net by Ookla = 205 Mbps then ran the Ookla Speedtest App = 97 Mbps.
Repeated both tests numerous times all with very similar results.
I e-mailed Ookla Speedtest but no reply (Jan 2022).
E-mailed a reminder but still no reply (April 2022).
Obviously not concerned about vast difference or know but are keeping quiet.
Wifi sweet spots are usually close to the Orange app I use here in France.
Donāt forget to run the app on the right device, mobile phones at 2.4 GHz will likely be limited to 70 ish Mbps speed, and will therefore only report that as the max speed. Same app running on an iPad at 5GHz will report up to 1Gbps.
The Orange app for France will collect speed data from the device itself and report that. eg. The phone app reports 70Mbps, but the same app reports its collected speed from my Chromecast as 585mbps.
Also a general point for anyone, most routers will now allow you to select more than one ssid, one for 5Ghz, one for 2.4 Ghz. If you run two network ssid and on your connected devices, select the matching network, you will likely find an improvement in network connections. eg. My Android phones and Sqbxās run on ssid home24, everything else on ssid home5.
Examples.
Download on mine is consistent, although upload for some reason always under-reads now, although the speeds reported by the Broadband Availability Checker is accurate and reflects the values reported by my HG612 modem.
