Would my system benefit from a network switch

They can help with traffic bottlenecks, I'm not sure there is any need given your situation for a switch. They are worth trying as the outlay is comparatively small though. I tried a network switch with no change at all registered, if you gain anything from the switch between nd5xs and superhub you lose on the wallwart supply (maybe!)

It might be worth considering a decent (maybe homemade or OEM) linear supply that can feed a router and switch combo. I'm going to make my own when I reinstall the hifi in our new home, but the job comes after sorting the septic tank!

I installed a switch when I was having problems connecting to my streamer via a BT Homehub.

All has run smoothly since.

On the negative side . . . one more potentially noisy power supply on the line may not be desirable. 

On the plus side, IF the switch built into your home hub is deficient, sure it could help. 

I had to add a switch, as I have many devices and my home hub had not nearly enough ports. 

For many home users it does depend on the quality of the implementation of the switchports on your Internet router.. Also depends on layout in your house so avoiding lots of parallel running Ethernet cables.

If you run your network player, NAS and upnp streamer into a switch, and then have a single lead going back to your wifi Internet router this can often make sense and make things neater and easier to look after.

Simon

Hi Scott,

I don't believe a switch will positvely or negatively affect the Sound Quality of your set. However it can affect user-comfort !!. For example by isolating all pieces that are required for playing music (i.e. NAS, streamer, ..) from all the rest (to do so, you'd need two smaal switches), you can avoid buffer issues and drop-outs. Your systems more or less gets its own chain, not affected by people downloading huge amount of data on an iPad or computer (other chain)

Iver

+1 - certainly works for me

Tog

Certainly a gigabit switch will give you more headroom, i don't think the unities etc have gigabit but overall on your network you will see a significant difference, just in things like uploading new music to your nas.

+1 to all

I got a small business quality Cisco gigabit switch and its made a world of difference for the home network. But, the only impact on the hi fi set up is that I can now copy files to my network drive much more quickly across the network.

I don't think the network will impact "jitter" per se but should help if you are getting drop outs or having connection issues.

I was discussing these issues with a customer of ours who is pretty much a networking expert. He was saying that many of these inexpensive gigabit switches do not have the capacity to run a full gigabit on every port. They splice the available capacity between the ports and perform some buffering when things get tough. For most applications, this isn't an issue, but when streaming music in real time you can get bad effects such as jitter distortion due to the buffering. So he runs a rather expensive (£3k) main switch which has 24 ports and can switch something like 1.8 terabits/sec on the backplane which gives him pretty much a full 1000Mbits/sec per port bandwidth. He's checked the results with scopes and the like, and he has seen a significant drop in noise and an improvement in performance. Needless to say, he runs a top-flight system which makes his switches (yes, there are others for the kids etc., running fibre optic) value for money.

And yes, as I understood it, the wires you use can make a substantial difference to the performance of the switch. If the switch detects that the wire can't cope with the throughput it has to drop the throughput on the backplane and therefore of your entire switch to the level that the wire can cope with...

Regards,
Frank.
All opinions are my own and do not reflect the opinion of any organisations I work for, except where this is stated explicitly.

True, but not likely applicable to the majority of Naim users, the Naim kit works at 10Meg tops so at max. throughput across a cheaper net-switch it's 1% of the rated capacity (tops!) With large volumes of higher (100Meg) traffic across a router things may get tricky so hiving off traffic across a 'local' switch junction (specific to audio) may yield sonic benefits, but even then you have to have expensive kit & ears.

TVinylrocks, with streaming and all the stereo bandwidths we use for streaming 100 Mbps is absolutely fine, and using 100Mbos or 1Gbps won't make the blindest difference to any jitter of the sample data. They are completely decoupled and unrelated.

Ofcourse Naim only supports 100BaseT (100Mbps) and I believe 10BaseT (10Mbps).

From a buffering point of view on a busy network, one needs to understand the backplane bandwidth of a switch.. And I suspect most cheap consumer  Gigabit consumer switches are somewhat limited... and you only really see the switch bandwidth specified on more expensive commercial switches.

The switch bandwidth < less than the sum of the port bandwidths.

Dont get me wrong if you see a cheap gigabit switch there is no harm in using it.. But it won't help with your streaming... But it might help with your NAS and it's backup. For great data performance one ideally needs to use Jumbo frames... So check your switch and NASes for Jumbo frame support.. 

BTW 192kHz/24 bit stereo is approx 9.3Mbps data rate.

Simon

I tried turning on jumbo frames a number of times and my network fell over each time. Not sure what I did wrong.

Hi Gary, well all elements on your network that talk to each other need to support the same size jumbo frames for improved performance. This includes enabling the correct settings on network adapters as well as ensuring your switches and router can accept large MTU sizes.

Jumbo frames essentially means enlarging the MTU size. However if you successfully run large MTU sizes or jumbo frames on your LAN then normally your Internet router will fragment the frame when you send that frame to the internet so as to send a valid Internet MTU size.

If performance drops or plummets, then it's probably because you have inconsistent MTU frame sizes on your LAN so there is a lot local fragmentation. If the don't fragment bit is set on a frame for wharever reason, the the frame will be discarded...

So in short it needs careful thought but hugely improves the performance of large data transfers, such as reading and writing vast amount of data to NAS's.

Simon

Thanks for that Simon. I vaguely recall when setting up my network at home that an MTU of 1500 was slightly too high and I had to go down to 1400 or so for internet use. So it would seem I can't set a larger size for my network because of the internet connection, which seems a shame...

Regards,
Frank.
All opinions are my own and do not reflect the opinion of any organisations I work for, except where this is stated explicitly.