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Does connecting a streamer to Ethernet make much difference compared to wifi?

Amber Audio said:
T is a big market now streaming is so popular and has been embraced by the high end companies - there is also a lot of opportunity to rake in £s selling BS products.
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I agree, and avoid dedicated/audio network products. My router is Vodafone's, switch from Zyxel and the cables from Lindy.

Besides most audiophile Ethernet cables are STP/shielded, and thus unfit for purpose.
 
5 pages in and for once the noise hasn’t been described as “parasitic “ Everyone must be trying to dream up a new audiophiles buzzword of the week🤣

im also still waiting for someone to tell me how my galvanically isolated Wi-Fi is worse than a multi switch setup in terms of noise? Any graphs to show? And also how would the switch know what was noise? Surely if they cut out the bad noise most audiophiles wouldn’t hear any of the Krud they listen to🤣🤣🤣
 
Agreed. And if you have decent speakers/room, all this is an irrelevance, or so insubstantial as to not be worth thinking about. Unless you have a vested interest of course.

PS I don’t sleep at night because I usually have a dog on my head.
 
I love my kit as much as the next bloke but I fear so much of this is a p$ssing contest for people who no longer go out and hear real music and need to look clever or big because they've spent multi thousands on their system. They insist on staying home and playing the same old stuff they've always listened to but trying to justify that by buying more kit, more expensive kit, kit to fix other kit, kit to fix the fact that they only stream, kit that only plays round bits of vinyl, just in the hope it might sound better/different?

Get out to local venues, hear different stuff from people you don't know but in your genre or not your genre for gods sake. Sooner or later it will all be gone and all you will have is what you've got or what's already been recorded. So sad for sure...

Sorry rant over! :rolleyes::oops:o_O
 
Philip Read said:
I love my kit as much as the next bloke but I fear so much of this is a p$ssing contest for people who no longer go out and hear real music and need to look clever or big because they've spent multi thousands on their system. They insist on staying home and playing the same old stuff they've always listened to but trying to justify that by buying more kit, more expensive kit, kit to fix other kit, kit to fix the fact that they only stream, kit that only plays round bits of vinyl, just in the hope it might sound better/different?

Get out to local venues, hear different stuff from people you don't know but in your genre or not your genre for gods sake. Sooner or later it will all be gone and all you will have is what you've got or what's already been recorded. So sad for sure...

Sorry rant over! :rolleyes::oops:o_O
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Not everyone has a white Tesla...
 
Going the Wifi route saves the added expense of a $1000 Switch and $2000 Audioquest Diamond Ethernet cables.
The only hardware upgrade you can do for Wifi is to upgrade the air in the house with a vacuum, by installing a massive pump and hermetically sealing the windows.
Of course some of the ultra-premium streamers (Innuous, Taiko Extreme) eschew all wifi options, saying that the additional circuitry of building a wifi receiver comes at a sonic cost, and you are then stuck with using a hardwired Ethernet connection.

When I was using the Squeezebox Touch, it occasionaly would spontaneously lose all settings, and the only way to restore them was through a ethernet port, as trying to do this with Wifi invariably hung on the 'Select Language' option, which was even before choosing the ability to use a Wifi network.

I got tired of having to snake a 100ft ethernet wire from the router in one room to the SBT 3 rooms away, which is why I ended up with the Node N130, which works a treat with Wifi.
 
The streamed music in my home is on its own private mesh network on its own wi-fi channel.
 
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rontoolsie said:
Of course some of the ultra-premium streamers (Innuous, Taiko Extreme) eschew all wifi options, saying that the additional circuitry of building a wifi receiver comes at a sonic cost, and you are then stuck with using a hardwired Ethernet connection.
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And it is the same with my Antioodes streamer.

So the point would be, were they right when they decided to omit WiFi from their streamers on the grounds of sound quality? I presume they are right because surely that decision would otherwise cost them extra sales?
 
@Fourlegs If I was a little nearer Nick I'd pop round with my Eversolo and you could try wired vs wifi. Does it cost extra sales, extra cables, switches LPS's all have to be purchased otherwise all that krud/noise being generated will certainly spoil your listening experience. ;)
 
Fourlegs said:
And it is the same with my Antioodes streamer.

So the point would be, were they right when they decided to omit WiFi from their streamers on the grounds of sound quality? I presume they are right because surely that decision would otherwise cost them extra sales?
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Not really, WiFi uses a bandpass filter on the antenna so any of the spurious UHF noise you lot claim is an issue would be blocked :eek:
 
vacuum_tubes said:
Not really, WiFi uses a bandpass filter on the antenna so any of the spurious UHF noise you lot claim is an issue would be blocked :eek:
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Agreed, but it will also generate UHF noise when operating. All DSP generates noise, which is why you will have read that dedicated machines make better (quieter) streamers than computers because of the streamlined processing (no unnecessary tasks running on a dedicated OS) and low-power CPUs, also no mouse or large display.
 
Fourlegs said:
So the point would be, were they right when they decided to omit WiFi from their streamers on the grounds of sound quality? I presume they are right because surely that decision would otherwise cost them extra sales?
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No, they were wrong, because there is no good reason that Wi-Fi should deliver any worse sound quality than Ethernet. Of course, they may not have the engineering competence to deliver this neutrality, but that is another matter. What was it about their wifi implementation that upset their streamer? And why should you generalise that “Wiif bad, Ethernet good” from the experiences of one niche manufacturer?
 
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