Don't cross the streams? How to....

Posted by: Peter Earnshaw on 14 December 2016

Long time lurker first time poster.

 

I have a 272 into active ATC SCM50SLs in the drawing room and a Mu-So in the bedroom*. I also live on rural broadband and get poor bandwidth at best - between 2Mb/s and 10Mb/s depending on weather, tree growth alongside overhead wires and the whims of Openreach. If I want to listen to internet radio or stream from a site like Spotify or Tidal and have that happen on both devices but have only the one stream coming down my lowly pipe, how do I best achieve that? Is there a de facto way I have missed? From what I can see on the Naim app on iOS, if I select an internet radio station such as Jazz FM on both devices, each is receiving a separate stream and the use of my bandwidth is not optimal.

 

I know internet radio doesn't consume large amounts of bandwidth, but I do want to optimise where possible, and sites like Tidal will use a bit more. I share the pipe with guests in a holiday let attached to my property (although their use is throttled at the router) and with my wife and daughter who like to watch Peppa Pig via Youtube and call out to me if it stutters.... Openreach say I might be lucky with an upgrade around 2020. Until then I am sorely challenged!

 

I have an eye for a Unitiserve or Uniticore in the not too distant future, as a primary source for the CDs I have ripped to MP3 or ALAC on a Macbook at the moment. If I get one or the other, is there scope to use that to pull a single stream down from the Internet via one of those and then share it locally to the N272 and Mu-So? I can't get my head around how they might work in that regard.

 

Thanks in advance for any input.

 

*For anyone that knows me from PFM, I am almost done selling the rest of my valve/horn kit and happily settling on Naim/ATC for now!

Posted on: 14 December 2016 by David Hendon

You could receive the stream on one and multi-room it to the other couldn't you?

best

David

Posted on: 14 December 2016 by Peter Earnshaw

I had no idea you could do that! I just found out how.

 

Thanks.

 

I am a dunce

Posted on: 14 December 2016 by hungryhalibut

Sometimes things are simpler than you think. If you have your music on a nas already there seems little point in spending money on a Core that you don't need. 

Posted on: 14 December 2016 by David Hendon

Ah well HH and I don't agree about Unitiserves and Cores, even if I do listen to him on some other things (see thread on buying from HiFi mag reviews).

Anyway I'm glad we were able to help you Peter. There is a quality consequence of multi-rooming so I suggest you stream on the 272 and multiroom to the muso rather than the other way round. Also you will find you can't multiroom analogue inputs or hi def files.

best

David 

Posted on: 14 December 2016 by hungryhalibut

It would be boring if we all agreed on everything. That's a good reminder about having the better system as the master, something I'd forgotten. 

Posted on: 14 December 2016 by ChrisSU

Multiroom is certainly going to be better than sending the same web stream to multiple devices. My crappy rural broadband is about 4.5MB - in the past I had endless hassles, dropouts etc, but I found that swapping ISPs until I found a reliable one helped. My current provider seems to be able to give me a consistent service where others were constantly causing problems, so I would recommend looking around. Streaming Tidal at CD quality is no problem, although if iPlayer is on the TV at the same time it will probably struggle.

Oh yes, and Please stop ripping your CDs to MP3!! At least if you get a Core it will make short work of re-ripping them to a lossless format. 

Posted on: 14 December 2016 by dayjay

That's a great title for a first post

Posted on: 15 December 2016 by Peter Earnshaw

@Chrissu -  I found that I could poll neighbours and discovered that one neighbour, whose phone line went to the same telegraph pole on my property as it happens and then connected across to his house, was getting double the bandwidth. Multiple complaints to Sky (he was using Zen) later and I discovered the exchange had two different types of equipment, the 20th century and 21st century networks, or something like that. After prodding and also chatting to local Openreach engineers that came to my property, someone did something to patch me across at the exchange and I suddenly had double the bandwidth!

 

But I switched from Sky to Zen anyway because it had taken the threat to leave to get them to raise the paperwork to get it done so I thought they needed the punishment . You could investigate to see if the same applies to you...

Regarding MP3, the collection I have is something like ten years old and I just copied it to a NAS so I didn't lose it when the old Macbook finally expires. I have to rip it all again hence the interest in a 'proper' ripper that rips to WAV and delivers optimal sound quality. I could just configure my old Macbook to rip to WAV or AIFF but like the turnkey Naim idea

 

@David Hendon - SQ for multiroom is not important, it's just background music in that mode