A separate network for music

Jonas, it's hard to confirm without seeing your setup but you might be having challenges with multicast discovery on your wifi or on your upnp server. If Nstream loses your network player and tries to search for it then itsounds discovery related. I can recommend getting a little Apple Airport Express to act as wireless access point. Setup a new bridged SSID (wireless network name) and have it seperate from your old wireless network. Call it 'media wifi' or similar and connect your Nstream to it, and you will find wifi  reliability for discovery improves.(the apple device supports multicast discovery as it is used by AirPlay and uPNP.). Plug your  airport express into your new switch. 

Ensure you don't enable NAT on your express and if you are using your Internet routers DHCP disable that on the express as well.

Its what I use here at S-in-S Towers and it work a treat and offers discovery improvement over my Cisco 870 wifi access point / edge router. Remember the wifi is just for the control point / iPad, streaming is via the wired Ethernet from your switch.

Simon

Jonas as others havesaid use Wikipedia for the terms, but in short

Router: a device to connect two different networks together.  Sometimes  and used to be more generally called a 'gateway'. An example of different networks are your Internet acess network from your ISP and your local private network ( LAN) at home. Some router contain switch ports (see next) and consumer Internet / WAN router contain firewalls and the interfaces for ADSL and  Ethernet.

Modem: really a term used for dial ups where digital signals are modulated to and from the audio band. Sometimes used (slightly incorrectly) to describe the ADSL interface. If you use Superfast ADSL or fibre you will usually have a terminator with an Ethernet port that then connects to your router.

Switch: these connect devices together on single networks such as your LAN and allows the devices to all use the network at the same time. There is no routing, they work at a lower level than routers and switch network frames. Switches are designed to be fast and allow traffic to and from the right switch port. (although bundled software controlled switch ports on consumer Internet routers can have poor performance, often beneficial to use seperate dedicated switch). Switches work out where each frame should be switched to without sending unwanted frames. This allows fast efficient operation. Switches allow devices to send receive at the same time without breaking flows. Another performance benefit, and of benefit for streaming. Switches also handle multicast. Consumer switches simply re broadcast multicast frames  which is fine for limited basic  multicasting such as AirPlay andIUPnpP  and advanced switches use listen in to or 'Snoop' IGMP for when you have many multicast applications on the same network. (rare for home use)

Ok, I get your point now (by the way, please replace "modem" by "router" in my previous post )

Christian

Yep - use a separate dedicated switch for your streamer - one thing that Linn always advise.

Works for me anyway.

Tog

Well, use a switch, but as stated there is no value to a 'dedicated' switch, you are simply deluding yourself.

netgear do fine switches. I would suggest that an unmanaged one is fine, I have a managed one but have never touched the interface.

+1  

Netgear, Gigabit, unmanaged.  About $10/port here in the US (they do 5-port and 8-port versions, in the blue case). 

Jonas follow Barts and Garyi advice

Gary I think they were referring to having a 'seperate' switch from the Internet router - to which there is often value, as opposed to using a 'dedicated' switch for just the streaming devices, which as you say is of no consequential benefit for the vast majority of implementations.

Simon

So what is the order of devices coming in from the "wall"?

I currently have a cable modem (provided by the carrier), a 4 port Netgear router, a Vortexbox appliance, and using the SB Touch wirelessly from the VB (and also to use its own internet radio) into the DAC on my SN.  Should I add a switch as well?

Mark, what is not working on your setup? Usually Netgear devices are of a good quality so am a little surprised if its switch ports fail. But if they are then connect a switch to one of your netgear switch ports, and then plug the streamer and vortexbox and if you have trouble with wifi the apple airport express into this new switch.

Simon

Hi Simon: Nothing is not working in any way (wow, how's that for a nice double negative!?)  In fact I have even been able to play my VB while simultaneously ripping discs with no dropouts at all - I just wanted to understand what everyone is recommending here and see if I needed to get a switch...but so far so good.

Am I sacrificing SQ by having my music go through wireless from VB to SBT?  I have the VB in a completely different room with my main PC and the router, UPS backup, etc.

Mark, if it's working well with no dropouts I doubt you will be suffering from any SQ issues, just enjoy, the advice given was really for those who were having challenges with the basic operation.

Happy new year!!

Simon

From my understanding, as long as the bit get where they are going in time to be assembled and fed to the DAC, it seems that SQ should never be an issue, but sometimes the talk here makes me wonder. 

Thanks for clearing that up and I think I will really like the convenience of the NAS, but I also will be checking it against my CD5X whenever I get situated (someday).  And happy new year to you and yours as well!