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Streaming: Qobuz, DLNA, UPnP etc

Tony L said:
I’ll be interested to see how you get on.
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I've been running the new setup for a week now... not a single issue with video conference calls now, also everything is noticably more responsive e.g. Roon playing music seemingly instantaneously after pressing play, websites loading as if they were hosted locally etc.

A big 👍 for replacing the BT Smart Hub 2 router with the Draytek / Ubiquiti combination anyway... thanks again to this thread for alerting me to the possibilities :)

Chris
 
Cool. That is the next step for me. The broadband upgrade has really helped, it is a lot better, but I’m still getting a couple of drops now and again. I’ve not decided what router to buy yet though.
 
Dropped within the first 3 minutes of playback this morning, which is kind of infuriating given a Monday morning has to be about as low-traffic as it gets for an ISP. I really can’t decide what to do here as the Poly/Mojo (which I assume has some buffering/pre-fetch ability) works absolutely fine. In true audiophile style I’m focussing on a 2-5% sonic improvement rather than accepting something that just works.

Do I throw money at a high-end router just to see if I can get the DSX to stream Qobuz properly, or do I sell it to someone who just wants a really nice properly high-end network audio player (here it performs absolutely flawlessly) and just buy myself another nice high-end DAC with more inputs? It is a bit bulky to just keep around as a DAC for CD and I have absolutely zero interest in local network music storage myself (my only interest in streaming is exploring new music, if I like it enough I buy the vinyl). The Poly/Mojo is absolutely fine here and I have enough inputs on my preamp to leave it hooked up (the Verdier is remarkably full-featured for an audiophile preamp!).

That said I do know the Smart Hub Two is pretty crap. It is well documented as being hopeless for latency, hated by gamers, and that is backed up by very simple performance testing sites here (Waveform, Cloudflare etc). It is just an acceptable budget/free router given out by ISPs. I find myself increasingly drawn to a DrayTek 2927AX even if it is way more complex and versatile than I’ll ever need (I’d prefer too many options than too few). I’d quite like one anyway...

Option-paralysis strikes!
 
Tony L said:
Dropped within the first 3 minutes of playback this morning, which is kind of infuriating given a Monday morning has to be about as low-traffic as it gets for an ISP. I really can’t decide what to do here as the Poly/Mojo (which I assume has some buffering/pre-fetch ability) works absolutely fine. In true audiophile style I’m focussing on a 2-5% sonic improvement rather than accepting something that just works.

Do I throw money at a high-end router just to see if I can get the DSX to stream Qobuz properly, or do I sell it to someone who just wants a really nice properly high-end network audio player (here it performs absolutely flawlessly) and just buy myself another nice high-end DAC with more inputs? It is a bit bulky to just keep around as a DAC for CD and I have absolutely zero interest in local network music storage myself (my only interest in streaming is exploring new music, if I like it enough I buy the vinyl). The Poly/Mojo is absolutely fine here and I have enough inputs on my preamp to leave it hooked up (the Verdier is remarkably full-featured for an audiophile preamp!).

That said I do know the Smart Hub Two is pretty crap. It is well documented as being hopeless for latency, hated by gamers, and that is backed up by very simple performance testing sites here (Waveform, Cloudflare etc). It is just an acceptable budget/free router given out by ISPs. I find myself increasingly drawn to a DrayTek 2927AX even if it is way more complex and versatile than I’ll ever need (I’d prefer too many options than too few). I’d quite like one anyway...

Option-paralysis strikes!
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I picked up a used DrayTek 2672 locally for £10 to try with the intention of getting something more modern (though this unit is only 3yrs old) if it performs better. It was a pain to set up but after about about an hour of configuring it to Sky (and I’m a numpty when it comes to IT and networks) it all works fine. Have not improved speeds but has halved the latency.

In my case, I can not improve what I have coming into my house as I’ve get the best I can get right now and there’s no plan for my road to get Fibre or Virgin media anytime soon.

Having the DrayTek in places I’ve definitely seen a massive reduction in drop-outs to the point I’m happy to live with it. I’ve stress tested the DrayTek by having my whole network connected to it, streaming from Sky and YouTube whilst streaming from Qobuz simultaneously to my Akurate and there’s definitely an improvement. It’s not 100% but I know I can’t get 100% perfection.
 
It’s been awhile since I optimized my broadband for streaming but one thing I did was to make sure my home was on a different channel than my neighbors who share the same connection. Being in the same channel range as a nearby neighbor doing heavy usage would be suboptimal.

I also think I did something with the Quality of Service settings to give higher priority to music streaming devices.

I also utilize a MOCA extender and SonosNet which helps matters as well.
 
HifiDan said:
Having the DrayTek in places I’ve definitely seen a massive reduction in drop-outs to the point I’m happy to live with it. I’ve stress tested the DrayTek by having my whole network connected to it, streaming from Sky and YouTube whilst streaming from Qobuz simultaneously to my Akurate and there’s definitely an improvement. It’s not 100% but I know I can’t get 100% perfection.
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I’m pretty sure I’m going to push the ‘buy’ button before the end of the day… Worst case scenario is it still doesn’t fix it, but it can’t make things any worse, and I end up was a faster, more secure, configurable and robust network. It does way, way more than I need (dual WAN, load-balancing etc etc), but it looks very good and costs little more than a dumbed-down Eero or whatever home device where you can’t really get at stuff should one want to.

John said:
It’s been awhile since I optimized my broadband for streaming but one thing I did was to make sure my home was on a different channel than my neighbors who share the same connection. Being on the same channel range as a nearby neighbor doing heavy usage would be suboptimal.

I also think I did something with the Quality of Service settings to give higher priority to music streaming.
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The DSX isn’t on WiFi, it has a direct cat5 cable link to a very nice Cisco switch connected to the ISP’s router. I do have the WiFi set to the least populated channels, and ironically the Poly/Mojo streams almost perfectly. It has glitched once in the time I’ve had Qobuz, that’s it. It just stops for a second and restarts at that point. The DSX just stops dead and drops the stream. You can’t even restart from the same point in the song!

QoS is a key reason I want to replace my router. The Smart Hub Two is just a low-end consumer box with nothing to configure really. It doesn’t have this functionality.

PS In case anyone hasn’t noticed; the Apple AirPort Utility in iOS/iPadOS has a useful WiFi sniffer option built in. It will show you all channels and networks nearby.
 
Tony it is a bit old now but I have a spare Archer 9200 router which you are welcome to use and see if a better router works . This replaced the old Plusnet and has been excellent . Only reason it is not being used is I now have Virgin and can not get the Virgin router to act as a modem .
 
Tony L said:
QoS is a key reason I want to replace my router.
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Will likely provide little benefit for you unless you have a house full of kids gaming, streaming music and youtube shite 24/7

Remember that there is no QoS over the internet (no matter what anyone tells you it does not exist)

You need to determine why your DSX is having issues with playback, until then things like jitter, latency, bufferbloat or QoS are just buzzwords.

If the DSX has zero buffering and the Qobuz stream is dropping packets or suffering from jitter then traffic shaping may help but there's a limit on how much the queue length can fix things.
 
I have just bought a DrayTek 2927ax!

PS Thanks for offer above, but I only want to spend time learning the intricacies one router configuration interface and it may as well be DrayTek. It is a high quality business-grade router so pfm can buy it. If the DSX still craps out it is either it or Qobuz. I’ll have ruled me out. I’m not a huge fan of spending £300 on a router (I went with Scan as I’m not a fan of Amazon marketplace despite being £25 less), but it is a good bit of kit that should keep things running fast and secure for many years.
 
Tony L said:
…The Poly/Mojo just dropped out so maybe Qobuz is crap today.
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I don't know if this observation helps or not but with my main streaming system Qobuz can be unreliable using the third party app's default configuration. A Qobuz track will occasionally terminate and play goes on to the next track in the play list. This does not happen if I use the official Qobuz app on an iPhone or a PC so I investigated the differences.

The official Qobuz apps download a complete track at a time to local storage.

The third party Qobuz app by default downloads in smaller chunks, many per track.

I verified the behaviour above by looking at my router's traffic graph as I played a track. However, when I set the third party Qobuz app to "persistent mode" (re-try broken connections several times before giving up), or to "cache a complete track locally" as per the official app behaviour, it became completely reliable. I suspect the Qobuz server capacity prefers fewer connections and bigger downloads per connection.

I don't know Qobuz in mconnect and how it behaves or if it can be configured. From what you write I suspect more than one cause is in play, though. However Qobuz may indeed be a part of the story as per my experience.
 
John Phillips said:
I don't know if this observation helps or not but with my main streaming system Qobuz can be unreliable using the third party app's default configuration. A Qobuz track will occasionally terminate and play goes on to the next track in the play list. This does not happen if I use the official Qobuz app on an iPhone or a PC so I investigated the differences.
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All my computer stuff is Apple; I’ve got a iPad, iPhone and a MacBook Pro.

My streaming hardware is the Chord Poly/Mojo2 and the DSX.

In practice this means using a Qobuz-related app on the iPhone or iPad and either Chord device as a renderer.

The official Qobuz iOS/iPadOS app only supports AirPlay, so no way of streaming high-res to either Chord from that. This is why I use the Mconnect Pro app.

The DSX is just a UPnP/DLNA network renderer. It is a very simple device. It can’t do anything other than be a DLNA renderer (or a coax-input DAC). The Poly/Mojo2 is more recent so can do the UPnP/DLNA render thing, plus adds AirPlay (non-high-res) and also can share its SD card as a UPnP server. As an example I can (using MConnect) play music from the Poly’s SD card via the DSX, and that actually works flawlessly.

My impression is streaming remains rather clunky, though it is certainly a hell of a lot better than when I tried it a decade or more ago with a Logitech Squeezebox Touch, which was awful IMHO (sonically and interface).

If one is happy with standard-res I bet the Qobuz iOS app and Poly via AirPlay works fine. I’ll give it a try sometime. I’m pretty sure the user interface of the official Qobuz app is a lot better and more useful as a search tool than MConnect (which is pretty poor) too, I’ve just not spent any time with it yet as it is 100% incompatible with the DSX (it can’t communicate with a DLNA renderer, which is so annoying).
 
I certainly think it was having a bad day today as this is the first time the Poly/Mojo couldn’t handle it (it dropped twice and couldn’t recover either time).
 
Tony I have used LMS for many years and it has always offered me everything I need . It is also pretty much bomb proof and works every day around the house . I use a Logitech Transport but only as source in to my dCS pair . The addition of Material Skin GUI many years ago makes the interface very user friendly . I also having tried a few others find that LMS has very good sound quality . We are all different but current LMS is as good as anything else I have heard .
 
Fair enough, I know some really liked it, I just didn’t get on with it at all. dCS gear is superb, so if it can scale to that it must be doing something right. My experience was right at the other end of the market with a Squeezebox Touch and a MF V-DAC. I hated the interface and it just sounded dead in the water compared with playing the CD!
 
bencat said:
Tony I have used LMS for many years and it has always offered me everything I need . It is also pretty much bomb proof and works every day around the house . I use a Logitech Transport but only as source in to my dCS pair . The addition of Material Skin GUI many years ago makes the interface very user friendly . I also having tried a few others find that LMS has very good sound quality . We are all different but current LMS is as good as anything else I have heard .
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LMS running on a Mickey Mouse laptop and a couple of Squeezebox Touches worked solidly for me years ago when routers and internet were far less capable. I am sure they still would, but I now use Roon which is also solid. Tony’s problem seems to be he is using crap hardware from the streaming point of view - ie Chord - and ancient UPnP which is crap even when it works. A second hand Mac mini could be an excellent Roon endpoint and core, alternatively a Raspberry Pi running RoPiee. Another option might be to try Audirvana as this integrates Qobuz streaming and your own music and claims to see UPnP endpoints. Listening to music with dropouts is totally unacceptable and unnecessary.
 
Surely Roon is just a monthly idiot tax for people who can’t get streaming to work? It is grotesquely overpriced given it just appears to be a wrapper/interface. It looks cool, but should cost £20 as a one-off lifetime payment IMHO.

PS As I’ve mentioned previously I have zero interest at all in local music storage. Genuinely none. If I want to hear something I know and like I’ll just play the record or CD, as I’ll certainly own it and it is what they are for! My use for streaming is purely education/exploration. I want to hear new things, and it is already proving very useful for this.
 
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