Qb in da house

Ha - yes, thanks. 

Plusnet tell me BT did work in our area last night but it shouldn't be causing a problem today. That 'shouldn't' is a whole lot softer than Naim's 'it can't do that' so some leaning on the broadband people to sort it out awaits. 

Have to say the details of muso's using a legacy protocol (or whatever you call it) for their internet connection has gone consistently over my head, but it sounds like that's something entirely separate. 

On the plus side it's kept me occupied for a day of awaiting the dealer delivering the SN2 & B&W 804s I couldn't carry home quite so easily. 

Sam,

If your broadband is unreliable then all bets are off with respect to wireless performance for streaming from Internet streaming services so you need to get that sorted first.

The point about mu-so wireless support is that Naim have chosen to implement a rather old wireless standard. mu-so (original and Qb) support the 802.11b and g standards only. 11g was ratified as a standard way back in 2003. It was superceded by 802.11n which was in wide use in draft form in 2007 and was finally ratified in 2009. The latest standard now widely supported in new devices is 802.11ac which was published in late 2013.

Each revision of the standard brings better performance in the form of higher data rates, support for more clients, more sophisticated support for streaming applications, and access to different wavebands. However, at each stage the standard is careful to maintain backward compatibility so that you can use a mix of different devices supoorting different versions of the standard on the same access point.

The chances are most of your wireless devices are wireless n or ac compliant, and most products launched over the past couple of years have supported one of these newer standards. You can see that Qb supports a standard that is now already two revisions out of date and which is 13 years old.

Now, as far as streaming music at standard CD-quality goes, there is nothing wrong with this on its own as there is more than enough bandwidth on a wireless g connection to stream music. However, the issue lies in the enforced compatibility that running a mu-so on your wireless access point requires. Basically, running an older device slows down traffic for all your newer devices as the access point has to communicate at slower wireless g speeds to make sure the old devices can keep up. This reduces the network performance of your whizzy wireless ac router and your newer devices. There are ways to get around this but they require you to work harder than you should.

That said, the results in terms of compact and portable music reproduction are brilliant with Qb. I hope you can get your broadband sorted soon. Meanwhile, Qb also supports Bluetooth, so maybe you can show off the sound quality that way until the network access is sorted?

A plea for help in including images in a post please!

Posting under this topic as I plan soon to start a new topic under Streaming Audio to focus on solutions to problems some have reported with the use of wi-fi to connect to the Qb in particular. I will post a link here when done ...

But I want to include images. Not allowed as attachments. The insert/edit image option in the formatting header has defeated me. Running on a Mac in Safari under OSX. I have tried pasting in the full path to the image, get no error messages but also no image. Do the dimensions have to be set manually!? If so, what are the units?

Currently making me more annoyed than the restriction to 802.11 g/b

Is the image posted on a third party site such as Flickr? If not it has to be. After that (using Mac/Safari) I find the Flickr address needs editing down before it works and that's a bit of trial and error as I only post pics here infrequently. Once you have got the image address correct in the insert image window, it's easy just to adjust the size in one dimension - the other adjusts proportionately automatically.

All reasonably well explained in the FAQs

Clive

Thanks Clive

FAQ now found at https://forums.naimaudio.com/to...web-into-your-post-1

I had been hoping to include an image from my Mac as you can do on most other Forums. Never thought that there would be so many pictures of Qbs with tomatoes on Flickr!

New topic now posted at https://forums.naimaudio.com/topic/qb-in-the-kitchen

Pleased to report it was a complete coincidence - a 1/10000 one that the first time the broadband has had a major issue in a few years was within an hour of plugging the QB in. 

Naim support's "it can't possibly cause that" was very useful in getting the broadband provider to not try to shift responsibility... They appear to have fixed the issue overnight - wood touched etc. 

Am I understanding this correctly?

I f have a muso qb and use it wirelessly that my shiny new Airport Extreme which I got to take better wireless advantage of my 250 Mb broadband speeds will revert to transmitting lower speeds wirelessly basically "dumbing down" all speeds to suit the muso qb?

 I find this hard to countenance if this is the case, and would have thought that modern wireless prouducts like the Airport extreme would have an in built way around supporting "legacy formats" that would negate all its new capabilites.

SJB

SJB, I'm afraid it doesn't work that way. Modern wireless products like the Airport Extreme support the latest wireless standards, but to get the best performance you need to use modern clients that support the same standards. An Airport Extreme supporting a mix of 11b, g, and n clients is going to suffer from the performance issues described above as the access point has to step down to the speeds of the slowest clients to ensure that they can keep up.

The alternatives to avoid this problem include:

• Use a wired connection. Always the best option if possible and it will allow you to stream hires reliably.
• Use powerline connectors. But, powerlines create undesirable RFI effects that can affect other wireless equipment and possibly your sound quality.
• Use a wifi extender that provides a wired connection, such as the Apple Airport Express or the Netgear EX6150 and wire the Qb to the extender. In this way you can run the Qb over a 5GHz network.
• Use an old router and set it up as a separate access point exclusively for legacy devices supporting 11b/g and do not allow legacy devices to associate with your "main" router.

The extent to which running a legacy device with your shiny, modern Airport Express is going to be a problem will vary depending on the number of other wireless devices you are using and what you are doing with them. Web browsing probably isn't going to create a big issue but simultaneous media streaming or downloading probably will be affected.

Adrian wrote:

"An Airport Extreme supporting a mix of 11b, g, and n clients is going to suffer from the performance issues described above as the access point has to step down to the speeds of the slowest clients to ensure that they can keep up."

Actually, AFAIA the latest Apple versions run two separate networks (n 5 GHz and the rest) to avoid this, though this unlikely to help the Muso/Qb since they are only g. That's is certainly the case with my Time Machine network.

Adrian wrote

An Airport Extreme supporting a mix of 11b, g, and n clients is going to suffer from the performance issues described above as the access point has to step down to the speeds of the slowest clients to ensure that they can keep up.

Whereas Apple say at http://www.apple.com/uk/airport-extreme/

AirPort Extreme features simultaneous dual-band 802.11ac Wi-Fi. That means it transmits at both the 2.4GHz and 5GHz frequencies at the same time. So no matter which band your wireless devices use, they’ll automatically connect to the best available band for the fastest possible performance.

I find it hard to reconcile these two assertions.

Adrian_P posted:

SJB, I'm afraid it doesn't work that way. Modern wireless products like the Airport Extreme support the latest wireless standards, but to get the best performance you need to use modern clients that support the same standards. An Airport Extreme supporting a mix of 11b, g, and n clients is going to suffer from the performance issues described above as the access point has to step down to the speeds of the slowest clients to ensure that they can keep up.

The alternatives to avoid this problem include:

• Use a wired connection. Always the best option if possible and it will allow you to stream hires reliably.
• Use powerline connectors. But, powerlines create undesirable RFI effects that can affect other wireless equipment and possibly your sound quality.
• Use a wifi extender that provides a wired connection, such as the Apple Airport Express or the Netgear EX6150 and wire the Qb to the extender. In this way you can run the Qb over a 5GHz network.
• Use an old router and set it up as a separate access point exclusively for legacy devices supporting 11b/g and do not allow legacy devices to associate with your "main" router.

The extent to which running a legacy device with your shiny, modern Airport Express is going to be a problem will vary depending on the number of other wireless devices you are using and what you are doing with them. Web browsing probably isn't going to create a big issue but simultaneous media streaming or downloading probably will be affected.

Any I idea if this would work. I have a netgear nighthawk extender which gives enough coverage to get the QB working for tidal etc but multiroom has been suffering from dropouts.

If I connected say Netgear EX6150 to the already extended network and then used it to connect the Qb via Ethernet(wireless bridge if I understand it correctly) would this improve things or would it simply be too much extending etc?

I have a UQ2 straight into main router via Ethernet and this is always stable.

Many thanks for any advice

Sam

noname posted:

Adrian wrote

An Airport Extreme supporting a mix of 11b, g, and n clients is going to suffer from the performance issues described above as the access point has to step down to the speeds of the slowest clients to ensure that they can keep up.

Whereas Apple say at http://www.apple.com/uk/airport-extreme/

AirPort Extreme features simultaneous dual-band 802.11ac Wi-Fi. That means it transmits at both the 2.4GHz and 5GHz frequencies at the same time. So no matter which band your wireless devices use, they’ll automatically connect to the best available band for the fastest possible performance.

I find it hard to reconcile these two assertions.

 

 

Noname,

I don't have an Airport Extreme but I do have a dual-band router. How it works with your mix of clients is in part up to you as it will depend on how you configure the radios and the SSIDs,  Let's assume that you use the same SSID for both radios, and that the Airport will "steer" 5GHz capable devices to the 5Ghz radio. In this scenario there are two situations when you will end up with 11n or 11ac devices on the 2,4GHz radio:

1. You have 11n devices that do not have a 5Ghz radio
2. You have 5Ghz 11n and/or 11ac devices that get a stronger signal from the 2.4GHz radio and so are steered there rather than to the 5GHz radio.

At the end of the day this may or may not be a problem for you on your network when using a Qb. Only you can decide that based on the mix of devices you have and how your network is configured. The best thing really is to try it and if you find it does have an impact then take one of the measures described above to work around it.

Not wanting to make a mountain out of a molehill here, but it just would have been much simpler if Naim had put at least an 11n 2.4GHz radio in the Qb.

ssmith posted:

Any I idea if this would work. I have a netgear nighthawk extender which gives enough coverage to get the QB working for tidal etc but multiroom has been suffering from dropouts.

If I connected say Netgear EX6150 to the already extended network and then used it to connect the Qb via Ethernet(wireless bridge if I understand it correctly) would this improve things or would it simply be too much extending etc?

I have a UQ2 straight into main router via Ethernet and this is always stable.

Many thanks for any advice

 

Sam

Sam,

I think this would be a case of "too much extending". Dasiy-chaining wireless extenders is not a good idea assuming it is even supported by Netgear.

They are very much a compromise solution because in addition to supporting locally connected clients wirelessly their upstream link to the router is also wireless, whereas with a proper access point the upstream link is wired. This effectively halves the wireless available bandwidth for clients connected to the extender. By daisy-chaining you would be halving the bandwidth with each link so it's debatable whether this would be useful even if it worked.

Can you draw a schematic of the network?

Adrian

You do not have an AirPort Extreme and I questioned your assertion

An Airport Extreme supporting a mix of 11b, g, and n clients is going to suffer from the performance issues described above as the access point has to step down to the speeds of the slowest clients to ensure that they can keep up.

I agree with your reply but do not see how that relates to your original assertion.

Under my topic Qb in the Kitchen I have asked the question of whether Naim did not include 802.11n at 2.4GHz because of the expectation to provide multiple antennas for MIMO

Adrian_P posted:

ssmith posted:

Any I idea if this would work. I have a netgear nighthawk extender which gives enough coverage to get the QB working for tidal etc but multiroom has been suffering from dropouts.

If I connected say Netgear EX6150 to the already extended network and then used it to connect the Qb via Ethernet(wireless bridge if I understand it correctly) would this improve things or would it simply be too much extending etc?

I have a UQ2 straight into main router via Ethernet and this is always stable.

Many thanks for any advice

 

Sam

Sam,

I think this would be a case of "too much extending". Dasiy-chaining wireless extenders is not a good idea assuming it is even supported by Netgear.

They are very much a compromise solution because in addition to supporting locally connected clients wirelessly their upstream link to the router is also wireless, whereas with a proper access point the upstream link is wired. This effectively halves the wireless available bandwidth for clients connected to the extender. By daisy-chaining you would be halving the bandwidth with each link so it's debatable whether this would be useful even if it worked.

Can you draw a schematic of the network?

OK thanks.

The only issue I have is when using multiroom streaming. Everything else works without any issue. What I am unsure of if the multiroom problems are something that is a naim issue or down to Wi-Fi setup.

Thanks

Now there is also impressive sound in the kitchen

noname posted:

Adrian

You do not have an AirPort Extreme and I questioned your assertion

An Airport Extreme supporting a mix of 11b, g, and n clients is going to suffer from the performance issues described above as the access point has to step down to the speeds of the slowest clients to ensure that they can keep up.

I agree with your reply but do not see how that relates to your original assertion.

Under my topic Qb in the Kitchen I have asked the question of whether Naim did not include 802.11n at 2.4GHz because of the expectation to provide multiple antennas for MIMO

 

Hi Noname

Not sure where the confusion is. The Airport (or any other dual band router/AP) can only avoid this issue if it can ensure that 5GHz clients are always on the 5GHz radio. There are circumstances when this cannot be guaranteed, in which case there will be a mix of clients on the 2.4GHz radio and the router will therefore be forced into mixed compatibility mode.

Apologies if I have not understood you correctly.

Thanks Adrian

It simply that you originally said *has* to step down ...

As I think you have now clarified this is not, in typical circumstances, the case.

This thread has become a little bit technical, which is one half of the reason I'm hesitating over buying a QB. My questions are:

- Have those who have taken the plunge been pleased and found it has enhanced their lives? Are they using it, is multiroom a cool feature and is a QB in the kitchen a worthwhile improvement over a decent (Ruark R1 in my case) kitchen radio?

- Does wireless work well? I'm not bothered about the reduction to 48khz for hi res and I can live with interference from the microwave for a few minutes. I just need it to be robust and reliable if it's about 5 metres from the router.

Cheers, Keith

KRM posted:

- Have those who have taken the plunge been pleased and found it has enhanced their lives? Are they using it, is multiroom a cool feature and is a QB in the kitchen a worthwhile improvement over a decent (Ruark R1 in my case) kitchen radio?

- Does wireless work well? .

Cheers, Keith

Yes .. Yes .. Yes .. Yes (multi room is very cool) .. Yes .. Yes (wireless works very well) .. all opinions are my own of course.

Hi KRM

I have tried moving my own technical issues to a different topic under Streaming, but as one of the people raising these points let me be the first to have a go at reassuring you.

- Have those who have taken the plunge been pleased and found it has enhanced their lives? Are they using it, is multiroom a cool feature and is a QB in the kitchen a worthwhile improvement over a decent (Ruark R1 in my case) kitchen radio?

The Qb does sound great and we use it nearly every time we are in the kitchen, which is quite often! Multiroom synchronisation makes a huge difference to us as our apartment is quite open plan and so we can always hear our other Naim systems in the background. We normally use an original Mu-so in the living area as the source of Multiroom. It works perfectly for the inputs it supports (which excludes the local digital and analogue inputs). I do not know the Ruark but see it is a DAB radio with Bluetooth. You will have no DAB with the Qb, but you will have Bluetooth and much more.

- Does wireless work well? I'm not bothered about the reduction to 48khz for hi res and I can live with interference from the microwave for a few minutes. I just need it to be robust and reliable if it's about 5 metres from the router.

This, as you know, is what some, but not all, of the technical discussion has been about. The microwave interference has not been experienced by most commenting here as far as I can tell. Indeed, under the other topic, I hope soon to be able to report on a leakage test of our Microwave. But please take it from me that the frustration in having our listening interrupted, if only briefly, has been "amplified" only be the excellent sound we are normally hearing. If you have portable devices on wifi, such as a phone or tablet, and they are working well where you would have the Qb, you have every right to expect the Qb to to be fine.

You do not say what other Naim kit you have, but remember that Multiroom only works with other Naim streamers.

Let us know if you have any more concerns or questions.

Yes, it's brilliant, and so much better than the Roberts we had before. The multiroom gets used a lot - The Archers is on in the sitting room and kitchen and is perfectly synchronised. 

I have found, re the wifi question, is that if there is a lot of wifi traffic, such as You Tube, the Qb would stutter. It depends whether you have lots of people using online gaming, You Tube and do on; if not it probably doesn't matter. Anyway, I have run a wire and it's now rock solid, and will stream 192k files happily. 

I forget where you live, but if it's anywhere near Emsworth you can come round and try for yourself.  

Hi Nigel,

Thanks for the offer. I'm in Chippenham, so about 100 miles, but I'll probably borrow one from my dealer. It's good that the Archers is working well as we listen to a lot of Radio 4 too.

Hi Noname,

The main system is NDS/500/252/300/804d. It's great that people seem to find the QB complements their main system. I was a little unsure after I bought a small hifi for the conservatory and never used it as sit down listening is always on the living room.

Keith

I've had no technical issues with mine, I only use it via WiFi and there has been no drop-out or stuttering, even when my teenage son is gaming, watching YouTube and talking to his friends on Skype - all at the same time!

It is located about 6 metres from the microwave, so maybe it is far enough away not to cause any issues.

As stated above, multiroom works perfectly. Yes, it is relatively expensive if mostly used as a kitchen radio (as I do), but I do find the sound quite compelling, preferable to the original Mu-so in fact. It also looks smart, so I can justify the cost to myself for those reasons alone.