Satellite Internet and Tidal

Hello.

You mention Satellite internet as part of the new configuration.  Is this correct?   This has high network latency compared to typical broadband of 4g services.  The Tidal service on the Naim streamers has had teething issues with latency.  Perhaps some of the folks on this forum that have direct experience of this can comment.

Do you know what latency your Internet service provides?

Hi Calumn,

Many thanks for your response. Yes, it's Satellite internet (high speed) but I have no idea on latency to be honest, not sure how to check. Would this account for the fact that it will stream perfectly well via my phone and airplay, but not directly through the Qute? This is a second system based in a vacation place, so the last word in fidelity isn't the end of the world, but now I have Tidal directly installed on the Qute, it certainly would  be nice to use it. 

Elbow posted:

Hi Calumn,

Many thanks for your response. Yes, it's Satellite internet (high speed) but I have no idea on latency to be honest, not sure how to check. Would this account for the fact that it will stream perfectly well via my phone and airplay, but not directly through the Qute? This is a second system based in a vacation place, so the last word in fidelity isn't the end of the world, but now I have Tidal directly installed on the Qute, it certainly would  be nice to use it. 

 

Hello Elbow

latency is high on all satellite internet so I suspect this is your problem. The download bandwidth you have will be high but the latency will also be high which isn't ideal. The  app you use on your iPhone will be using a different buffering design to the one used by Naim streamers, assuming you are also connecting your phone to the satellite internet and experiencing the same latency via the iPhone.

There was a good thread on this a couple of months ago. Do a search on this forum for "tidal streaming over satellite"

Thanks - I found it. Appreciate the help

Hi Elbow, Satellite latency on a geo stationary satellite will bw abou 650mS as determined by the speed of light.

Simon

Thanks Simon. It also seems that the signal has to travel between earth and the satellite four times via a NOC before it reaches my UQ. The music sounds mostly fine via my iPhone which works okay but it seems a shame that Naim hasn't taken account of the millions of satellite internet users in the US and elsewhere when designing their streamers. 

Elbow posted:

Thanks Simon. It also seems that the signal has to travel between earth and the satellite four times via a NOC before it reaches my UQ. The music sounds mostly fine via my iPhone which works okay but it seems a shame that Naim hasn't taken account of the millions of satellite internet users in the US and elsewhere when designing their streamers. 

I agree Elbow. Given the cheap cost of solid state storage, I don't get why streamers can't buffer large amounts of Internet streamed data to mask the underlying network protocol issues with latency. Streaming is predominantly one way traffic - download.  In your situation, I'd be happy to put up with a longer delay before the first track plays - in order to enjoy stutter free playback.  If the iPhone app can do it....

Gents, to be fair to Naim you would need a setting on the streamer called 'delay' or 'latency'. The greater the buffers the more the latency... There is no such thing as a free lunch however.. The greater the latency the more impact data loss or corruption will have for a given data throughput.

To Calumm's point, TCP media transfer is definitely far from one way, it's a constant two way communication. You would need to resort to UDP datagrams if you wanted just one way communication, and unfortunately the public internet is not friendly to UDP.

Simon