Minimising wireless dropouts on SuperUniti

Posted by: Tweed1234 on 10 September 2015

Hi there

 

After being suitably forewarned about the perils of wireless streaming on the SuperUniti, I was ready to think about living with running hideous lengths of Cat5/6 all over the house (my router and server is 2 rooms away from the living area where the SU lives).  

 

I use JRiver as the media server on Windows10, and have a collection of hi-res 24/96-192 tracks from HDTracks, in addition to a large collection of WAVs and FLACs.

 

Straight out of the box, sound quality was exceptional when it was connected. I could detect no difference between wireless and hard-wired.  That said, there were dropped connections every hour or two, with the SU taking anywhere from a few seconds to 30 seconds to reconnect.  Occasionally I needed to switch it on and off again for it to reconnect.  

 

Pretty disastrous, considering I'm using an ASUS RT-AC68U - fairly high spec dual band Gigabit router (handling a 1Gbs fiber).

 

The solution turned out fairly easy in my case.   On advice from a friend, he suggested the problem being network overcrowding - I live in a fairly built up area where every home is basically running high bandwidth connections.  I downloaded WifiInfoView, a freeware (and legal!) wifi scanner which looks at the network and sees which network channels every one is using.

 

There are 13 channels in total, however they all overlap with one another, there is some advice to stick to channels 1, 6, and 11 as they overlap least.  That said, they also tend to be the most popular default channels that routers go to.

 

So based on what the app picked up, I changed to one that had the least usage (in my case 10), and there was an incredible change in reliability.  I maybe get one dropped signal once every 3 days or so, but the system reconnects in a matter of seconds.  And I never have to restart the SU.

 

I have been told that it is possible that routers may dynamically change channels, and I may have to change it every now and again, but it hasnt happened to me yet.  To me, potentially having to log in to the router every few weeks to change a channel is a small price to pay for reducing wire clutter.

 

Wired clearly is most reliable, but just thought some of you might like to have an option to try out.  It's worked very well for me so far.

Posted on: 10 September 2015 by ChrisSU

Good to hear you found a cheap and simple solution to your problem. I'm lucky to live in a house with no neighbours close enough to be within wifi range, so this isn't something I have to worry about. I did, however, find that turning off the wifi on my Superuniti, and connecting an external device instead, solved my issue of very regular dropouts. 

Posted on: 10 September 2015 by Bart

Find a 'clear channel' definitely is good practice when setting up home wifi, particularly if you're going to challenge it with hi res and/or video streaming.

 

The next step, beyond that, is to use the best wifi hardware (home routers from isp's are NOT the best) you can afford.  If your home isp's router is not getting the job done, I'd look to upgrade the home wifi hardware to something more robust.

Posted on: 10 September 2015 by hafler3o

No-one seems to talk about fitting the high-gain antenna available as an option, WA5.

Posted on: 10 September 2015 by Tweed1234
15 quid? Clearly a printing error! People are clearly not talking about it because it is not 200 pounds and made from NASA rocket grade  polymer

(I'm probably getting one this weekend)
Posted on: 10 September 2015 by ChrisSU
Originally Posted by hafler3o:

No-one seems to talk about fitting the high-gain antenna available as an option, WA5.

I considered trying one of these, but I never got round to it before changing to an external wifi device (Airport Express.) Besides, I'm not convinced it would have helped in my case, as the wifi signal wasn't weak, and other more distant devices maintained their connection consistently. 

Posted on: 11 September 2015 by Simon-in-Suffolk

Hi yes, finding a free channel can be good way forward, however what looks free in one part of your house might show having traffic in another part of your house,  but assuming you don't live in a castle this is unlikely to be too much of an issue.

You should also be able to lock your wifi router to a particular channel, so it will stay there whatever. Works great, but don't forget, because if a neighbouring wifi uses that channel or there is interference your wifi will stubbornly stick to that channel and performance may drop off.

Also remember the 5GHz wifi band has more space, channels, and is less used.. Unfortunately Naim doesnt operate there at the moment.

 

Yes indeed a high gain antenna can actually make matters worse... MIMO that is multiple path input and output antennas is the way to go, and these will often be multiple external stub antennas are built on an internal circuit board.

Simon

 

Posted on: 02 November 2015 by Tweed1234

Quick update - after the last Tidal firmware install, the wireless streaming went nuts.  Every morning, it would refuse to initialise.  Basically it got stuck at the "Please wait, Initialising Inputs" screen, until i restarted the SU.

 

Then, I tried something I've not done before, which was assign a static IP to the SuperUniti on my router.  The change has been incredible.  The wireless is more stable than it was before the Tidal update, and more than it has ever been.  It has not dropped once, and has never needed re-starting, and the updating and reading from the Upnp has been blazingly fast.

 

I can't tell how much of this was the Tidal update, or the static IP, or the combination, but it is now rock solid.