Inky blackness - network tweak

Posted by: MangoMonkey on 16 November 2013

My network topology looks like this:

Synology in laundry room, to switch to Cat5 cable in the wall to cat 6 cable plugged into the streamer which is in my study. Using the media server in sinology.

 

I tried something this morning:

Synology in laundry room, to switch to Cat5 cable in the wall to Cat6 cable plugged into -> An apple router. The apple router gets hooked up to the PC that has dbAsset running. The apple router has a shielded screen cable running into the streamer. The dbAsset is pulling music through the network from the same nas.

 

The noise level has gone down a big notch.

Switching back to the older setup makes me feel queasy and annoyed.

 

I'm not entirely sure why this is better - theories:

a) The dbAsset is better

b) The cables are making the difference - Now I've got Cat 6 or better between the uPnp server and the streamer.

c) the streamer is doing less error correction/less work. My 2.4 Ghz PC is now doing the work of error correction caused by the cat 5 cable while reading files from the nas

d) dealing with much less cross talk etc. in the cables that are in the wall.

 

There doesn't seem to be any difference between dbasset pulling music from the nas vs from the local hard drive.

 

I'm not entirely sure what it means for the streamer in the living room - maybe I'll have to put a UnitiServe SSD right next to it.

 

 

 

Posted on: 16 November 2013 by james n

What 'noise level' problem did you have in the first place ?

Posted on: 16 November 2013 by MangoMonkey

well, just something low level that you can't really hear until it's gone. I was thinking it's EMI/RFI that I'm sensitive to, but in this case, since changing the upnp server from synology to Asset upnp has helped, it's probably something else.

 

I'll switch back to the old server to see if I still believe it makes a difference.

 

Sometimes, even 256Kbps through an optical cable sounds like it has a lower noise floor than the network interface.

Posted on: 19 November 2013 by garmtz

I have found that there are at least three things that can make your streaming sound better:

- Use high quality Ethernet cable - by far the most important one is the one going into the streamer. Try AQ Vodka or similar (the connectors really do seem to make the difference here, probably more than the cable itself)

- Transcode everything to WAV! BIG, B - I - G difference!

- UPnP servers do differ in sound.

 

In your case, I would use the best cable you can get your hands on into the streamer and install Minimserver on the Synology with transcoding to WAV enabled. This will give you a significant step up, regardless of what people may say!