struggling with tidal and spotify

rohan posted:

[@mention:1566878603907884], on the subject of dlan, curious to know whats the argument against them? 

2 things -  EoP is reputed to pollute mains & ethernet with RF noise.    The concerns range from basic RFI into areas outside your home to physical health.  A lot of myths & misleading info I'm sure, not helped by left over historical stuff but as I understand it the controls & standards that apply these days have cleaned up a lot of those legacy issues.  But no smoke without fire in my book.

My main concern is how well they do actually work;  a relative had BT Vision installed & BT used their own PoE adaptors.  It had discovery issues after a full powerdown & once in a while buffering drop outs,   & although BT came back a few times, it never did work reliably.  I took a few lengths of ethernet & couplers to her house & by-passed the adaptors.  That solved the discovery problem straight off.   I was 'volunteered' to run a pukka cable.  But to be fair to BT, it was not easy & took about 3 hours,  so can understand the advantage for them using PoE.

Powerline adapters of course don't support true ethernet over the mains - they effectively form typically a half duplex bridge in my experience - with the mains wiring being the bridge... half duplex in modern networks is not optimum as handshaking is required as data can only flow in one direction at a time - this means timing can be affected - and timing sensitive datagrams like multicast discovery datagrams can get lost or delayed. For regular TCP transfers which is most email and web usage and even net streaming where most of the traffic is one way then they can work ok, but of course throughput is effected with devices on the mains and mains interference

As far the electro magnetic compliance - I am afraid Homeplugs really are largely same as they have always been in my opinion other than there are improved techniques for reduced interference with each other and better immunity to some interference as well as lower energy usage when in standby.... however there is also now recognition of the harm they produce to protected radio services - and so the bandwidth they use is typically gapped to avoid polluting protected radio spectrum - the early devices didn't do this and there was much concern and Ofcom involvement in the early days with Amateur Radio operators,   and other protected radio users of  the HF, and VHF spectrum ... i know.... The trouble is in my humblest of opinions is the device manufacturers exploit a loop hole in the regs in as far as their EMC  is measured from the device itself - not from the radiation they cause from the mains wiring as a by product - as this radiation is not considered necessary to how they work - but it is the same by product  that radio uses !? ... anyway... at the end of the day there appeared too much commercial lobbying within the EU to control things properly and one seemed to be fighting a losing battle  - again my personal opinion  - so the view was that they would soon effectively decline in popularity and fade for  home networks as they are simply not that well suited  for faster home networks and wifi protocols have leaped frogged in their ability in recent years ... and certainly i 'hear' less power line adapters about now..

Thanks . Is there any proven impact on sq?  Not an expert but i have been streaming HD video and audio using devolo dlan  in my house for about 5 years Distance from main router in some cases is around 20 to 30 m to about 5 rooms across 2 floors hence went for the convenience and speed. Versus wifi. Cat6 cabling is gonna be quite disruptive and want be sure its worth it.

proven is an interesting concept - if you can hear the benefit of improved mains wiring and power line leads as well as hearing the effect of SMPS can have on your audio then almost certainly you will notice the impact with SQ but only you can tell. Power line adapters are like mains Switch Mode Power supplies on steroids

rohan posted:

Cat6 cabling is gonna be quite disruptive and The want be sure its worth it.

As a test, just get a long length of Ethernet cable and run it loose through your house. Unplug the Devolos and see what happens. You can buy extremely cheap Cat5e cables on eBay (not sure you need Cat 6) just for a trial.

Thanks I think i will try it and will revert..