Bandwidth for 24/192?

10/100 Mbps will be completely fine, but anyway if you were concerned you could connect the NAS and the Naim streamer via a switch like the Netgear GS105 (they are very cheap and in my experience work straight from the box, never to be worried about again) and connect that back to the router.

i hope this helps

David

+1 for changing up to a GS105 

I have Synology DS214  & connect to NDX via NetGear GS105 & play 24/192 files faultlessly

- the switch is branched to wireless hub for iRadio & other Naim system wireless requirements.

The problem with wireless router/routers is they are not switches & although they might say they are 10/100 megabit, in continuous running such as audio streaming they do a poor job,  they send information to every branch of the network, including the one that sent the data & the data send & receive interchange cannot be done simultaneously. A switch will be aware of all the devices on its network & send data to only the ports that required it & it does all the sending & receiving simultaneously making everything faster & defect free.  

errr... I think that's not right... the multi-lan ports on modern routers are switch ports in exactly the same way as using a separate switch - data only goes to the port it needs to.

A 24 bit / 192 kHz music file requires 9216 Kbps transfer speed, which is 9.216 Mbps. A 100 Mbps wired connection should adequately cope with that. I haven't tried it but my 53 Mbps WiFi shouldn't choke on these numbers either.

Not strictly correct, most home wireless devices are called hubs,  a router is actually something much more complex & able to manage more than one network.

ISP & basic domestic wireless hubs are not switches,  maybe some of the more expensive customer purchase types do incorporate true switches, but those that are not will not admit to it.

100Mbps (100BaseT)  - this runs encoding frequency aprx 31MHz

Ah, the WiFi network connection is 802.11b/g on the Muso which implies a maximum reception rate of 53 Mbps.

Also you only get the maximum WiFi speed if you are close by the router, there is no interference on the radio channel the router is using and you aren't sharing the WiFi with anyone else in the house. I dont use WiFi for my streaming at all but I have seen many reports on this forum of issues from other people trying to stream 24/192 kHz files over WiFi and having problems of dropout, waiting for buffering etc. Using Ethernet cables is much more likely just to work and Cat 5 is plenty good enough for 9 Mbps.

I hope this helps.

David

And a true max. throughput of half that.

Mike, most broadband wifi 'hubs' are not hubs at all, they are switches with often the wifi being bridged to the switch backplane. True hubs are very rare now in my experience. A true hub can't send and receive concurrently like a switch, it can only support half duplex transmission... Therefore a hub physically can't send back out what it receives on a port  .. as you can only do one at a time. A switch will usually prevent send and receive on the same port but uses a different algorithm by inspecting MAC addresses against port identifiers. A hub can't support 1GBps. With a hub you will get LAN collisions, this is two or more devices try and 'grab' the LAN at the same time and clash by sending data at the same time.. This data is discarded and resent by each device waiting a random time before doing so.. A hub will normally have a collision LED to indicate a LAN collision.

Simon

PS 192/24 Stereo is approximately 10 Mbps, and so a 100 Mbps link will be fine.

That might be so Simon & apart from disagreeing on wifi hubs having (or not) switches incorporated, I think my previous post described the send/receive limitations of a hub as you have, albeit in not so many words.

My experience with wifi hubs tells me different,  my first was a BT HH3 overheat to the point the plastic case distorted before it shut down. That old design hub was not a switch for sure & its shortcomings were easily fixed by adding a switch.  Next I temporarily hooked up my current BT HH4 as a switch (to prove to myself) & found it played 16 bit files OK & also managed 24/48 & 96k, but struggled with 24/192, cutting out & the Naim display showed buffer graph moving around.  Additionally it ran warmer than normal.  Now if this HH4 "hub" is trying to be a switch, it's not doing a very good job.  

I've had similar experiences with a neighbours Linksys & D-Links with AV that were fixed by adding a real switch.

Mike - now i didn't say that many broadband router/hubs contain good quality switches - and seemingly some are/have been quite fragile!!

Why?

What you quote (54meg) is the backbone PHY rate. This excludes packet overheads, retries, collisions, acq messages, handshakes, etc... Basically with any wifi network the true TCP throughput is about half the PHY rate. So 54meg 11g wifi is c. 25meg true. 150meg 11n is c. 72meg, etc...

Just done some tests with a couple of Zyxel routers and one Asus router. In all cases traffic only went to the destination port. Okay broadcasts went to all ports but that's the same on any switch. This creates issues if you DO want to see the other port traffic e.g. if you're trying to do some packet sniffing. It's why we have a good old fashioned dumb hub at work.... so we can easily packet sniff on network traffic when trying to analyse issues. Anyway I digress.... bottom line is most wifi routers seem to be switches not hubs. I think the issues you might have seen in the past are because the switch in the router was trying to take too active a role in the traffic flow. I've seen a similar thing before where a router can be crashing because it can't keep up with dipping it's nose into the lan port traffic. Put a simple low intelligence switch in front and peace is restored.

Steve, the best way to sniff a network is to insert a temporary managed switch that can span ports. A cheap used Cisco 2960 would be fine. This way you can tell the managed switch which ports to monitor and send the traffic to a particular port  you connect to Wireshark.

A hub obviously allows you to see everything on the network, but being half duplex, the dynamics of the link and transport exchanges change and network exchanges can look quite different at the lower layers on a network analyser .. it depends what you are debugging. Also multicast discovery is more problematic with hubs as the multicast UDP packets (which look like broadcast traffic on basic LAN setups) can be destroyed in a collision and so timing affected.

Simon

Also don't forget that for WiFi, that bandwidth is shared between all local devices using that frequency band, so your available bandwidth may be considerably less.

My Hauwei 'router' is definitely a switch / WiFi bridge, even though it's cheap and nasty.  However it does perfectly well for the computer, PVR and network switch to iRadio internet connection.

For the audio streamer and NAS, I use a separate switch (which also has a single connection to the 'router' for streamer to internet and computer to NAS traffic).

Best of both worlds.

So, would connecting two cat5 cables between a router and a switch improve speed/throughput?

Twice the speed,  of course, why didn't we think of that before

one for sending, the other for receive  ............  

Chuckle.. No! You would normally cause a network loop. And your network would grind to a halt and become saturated (frame storm).

if your switch and or router supported Spanning Tree Protocol, which is unusual for consumer stuff, then two parallel links would provide resilience.

if your router AND switch supported bonding / aggregation, such as EtherChannel, again fairly unusual on consumer stuff, but getting more popular, then the two or more links are merged together would provide a single logical connection. But this typically allows more concurrent connections for a given bandwidth rather than increasing the bandwidth of a single connection.

Simon