Wired or wireless

There's no harm in trying WiFi, but in my experience, (and judging by the large nimber of threads discussing it here, I'm not alone) Naim streamers just don't perform well without a wired Ethernet connection. There are various workarounds that can help using external WiFi devices, but a proper wire is better and cheaper.

Like ChrisSU says, the obvious approach is to try wifi and see where it gets you, most folks here favor a wired connection and by most accounts should be superior. Get some service people into your home to give an estimate of costs for the wired approach, they may find some alternate wired routes you haven't considered (fishwired through walls, an attic, etc.). You never know and even a couple hours from a carpet fitter doesn't seem all that expensive to me in the long run. Either way you'll pay a sum for a wired connection. The bigger questions for me would be the best wire type and router to use.

Nigel

had the same issue last year, my BT HUb is upstairs and music room is at the back of the house downstairs, so in short term I used Devolo connects - work but not ideal

last year I asked a local CCTV and cabeling company to wire from the router through to music room, took a couple of hours, no mess around £400 they installed ethernet connections in office by router then through top of garage to music room -

difference on now being direct wired is stunning - no drop outs, UPnP works really well

you could ask BT, lot of guys on the forum know a lot more about BT

That's seems the going rate. I paid £400 for an ethernet cable run through plastic trunking to an office in the garden about 120 feet away from the house. Interestingly our brand new iMac can now see the wifi hotspot in this office, the previous HP pc needed range extenders just to work in the house.

Always go wired IMHO. wifi is too unpredictable. However what people tend to ignore is, when running a lan cable from room to room, you do NOT go through the middle of the house! Go around the outside just like the telephone guy or the satellite installer. So neat RJ45 socket on the wall where the router is, out though the wall, around the house, back through the wall and another neat wall socket. 100m of outdoor cable, some wall RJ45 sockets and a box of hyatts, less than fifty quid all in. Installation time perhaps a couple of hours and an hour of that time is recessing the wall boxes for the RJ45 sockets - go for surface mounted wall boxes and that knocks 45 mins off the install time.

To bridge between buildings e.g. house and garden room, etc, when a cable is not an option then use a proper outdoor ptp wireless bridge using dedicated bridge units. That should be good for 60-70 meg throughput or go for 11ac bridge units in which case we're talking over 200-300meg (I mean true TCP throughput). It's also worth knowing that if you have ANY twisted pair wires between the buildings (e.g. a phone extension) then you can also bridge using the twisted pair as a medium using ethernet-to-twisted pair media converters which, over a couple hundred of feet, is good for several hundred meg throughput.

This is one of my grrr's at the moment,  a relative has just moved to a new build townhouse.  The one & only phone point was in the 2m long hall that was about the same width as the front door.  No room for a coat hanger let alone a phone and/or wireless hub.  She had the phone socket moved,  cost was whatever the standard BT engineers visit fee is.     Rant over:     ........

......   "There is however another phone socket in the living room, so I was wondering whether it's possible to move the master socket functions to this better placed socket?"      Yes do that first, it seems the obvious solution,  but maybe worth getting professional advise as extensions are not quite as simple as it might appear.         The best £129 I ever spent (& I'm an electrical engineer)  was to have BT move the landline entry point to where I wanted it in the house.  He also removed all old extensions & the 2nd line to fax & telex (remember those)    Removing the unused extensions did wonders for my line sync speed, the 3rd wire used for phone ringing (unwanted for broadband) & the unused open extension branches all add noise.   

Does anyone know what speed the Ethernet port is on the SuperUniti? My switch is stating 100mb but the length of Cat5 or 6 (cannot tell) is long. I am happy to run a better Cat 6 cable to the Uniti but want to first check if the beast supports 1gb. Any help would be greatly appreciated. 

Ian Aitken posted:

Does anyone know what speed the Ethernet port is on the SuperUniti? My switch is stating 100mb

All Naim (all streamers) work at 100Mb/s.     Its 100 BaseT @ aprx 31MHz & Cat5e conforms to this spec @ 100Mhz (up to 100m length).    No harm changing to Cat6 or higher if when you might be tempted,  but it won't turn the Naim into a Gigabit machine. 

Thanks Mike-B 100Mb/s it is

I think the 100 meg thing in Naim streamers is by design, as they are all like that, including the new Uniti range that's arriving soon. (Their servers are all Gb ethernet.) It's more than enough to stream music, my entire LAN runs at 100Mb and it's fine.

Mike-B posted:

......   "There is however another phone socket in the living room, so I was wondering whether it's possible to move the master socket functions to this better placed socket?"      Yes do that first, it seems the obvious solution,  but maybe worth getting professional advise as extensions are not quite as simple as it might appear.         The best £129 I ever spent (& I'm an electrical engineer)  was to have BT move the landline entry point to where I wanted it in the house.  He also removed all old extensions & the 2nd line to fax & telex (remember those)    Removing the unused extensions did wonders for my line sync speed, the 3rd wire used for phone ringing (unwanted for broadband) & the unused open extension branches all add noise.   

Yes easy.... there's only two wires to worry about (PSTN is a single pair). So on the current master there should be a pair coming in to pins 2 and 5. The master has the bell cap. (though often not needed nowadays since most modern equipment has this built in). From the master pins 2 and 5 to the extension pins 2 a 5 there should be be another pair; you can tell from the colours which are a pair by the colour with white e.g. blue with white stripe is paired with white with a blue strip - easy! To carry the 'ring' the extension there would sometimes be a single wire from pin 3 on the master going to pin 3 on the extension. The actual colours don't matter but the wires to 2 and 5 have to be a pair.

So to 'move' the master to an extension then, from the old master, remove all extension wires except the one you want to use as the new extension. Also remove all wires from pin3 the bell terminal on the master. Now the single extension has a single pair from 2/5 going to 2/5 on the master. You have now magically made the extension into the new master but sans a bell cap. As I said before you normally do not need the bell cap. nowadays so it's absence on the 'new' master shouldn't matter. However if your going to do this properly you should really install an NTE5 at the new master (that's the wall socket that BT install at the master - it have to lower half of the front panel removable). The reason for doing this is because you should fit a proper face-plate splitter since these give the best DSL speed. So at the new master take the old extension box off the wall and fit an NTE5 there instead. Connect the incoming pair to the terminals A/B on the NTE5 (these are like the 2/5 but A/B denotes incoming). Now replace the front panel of the NTE5 with a proper faceplate splitter which has a DSL port and a PSTN port.

Ensure there's nothing connected or plugged in at the old master except the single wire pair going to the new master.

Any extensions should now be run from the new master and, since you've now fitted a proper DSL faceplate, then any extensions should be run from the filtered OUTPUT on the faceplate.

If you follow this then the incoming DSL follows a continuous run from outside through to the input (A/B) on the new master NTE5. There should be nothing connected or plugged in and no extensions or wires ongoing except the single pair to the new master.

As Mike mentioned, removing all extensions from the raw, incoming, pair will significantly improve your broadband. Also using a proper DSL faceplate splitter instead of those rubbish plug in ones will also help a lot.

Any questions you know where I am :-)

If the house is carpeted throughout, there is usually a small gap below the skirting board or under the edge of the carpet outside the grippers; the other option is to run a Cat5e Ethernet cable hidden in one of these gaps.  Sometimes this is really simple, sometimes not.

 Nigel, it is best to have rage run to your master socket where you connect your modem as short as you can and away from anything in your house that could creating electrical noise. If you are going to have BT move it, which is quite possible given the above caveat  and effective but quite disruptive with cable routing.

The best option I suggest is to use a modem or ISP broadband router near your master socket entry point with DSL master socket ( best avoid the old multiple filter non DSL master socket option as broadband performance is usually impacted). If you use a modem you can can have the modem by the DSL master socket and then run an Ethernet lead from the modem through your house to the WAN input of the broadband router... just remember you won't be able to use just about any consumer switch on this link, it will need to be a direct cable patched point to point. (Modem to WAN input on broadband router) this allows you to more conviently locate your router wifi if your master socket location is less convenient. The cable carries PPP over Ethernet frames.

Optimum reliable performance ADSL  or VDSL requires some consideration here.

As far as wifi.. it really depends on size and construction of house and number of clients . If you have a typical new build housing modestly sized estate type house, with a only few clients then a single wifi access point is probably fine .. if you house is larger and/or has older construction, or you have many clients using your wifi then having multiple cooperating wifi access points works best ( this is ho w most commercial setups are provided). Effectively the access points work using an ESSID and hand off between themselves.... I say don't use consumer extenders as they really tend to cripple wifi performance and reliability compared to what you otherwise would have (just by the way they have to work)... they are a cheap consumer kludge. If you want to do this you would disable the ISP broadband router wifi and setup multiple access points such as Unifi access points. 

If you decide to use wifi as a point to point connection between two Ethernet switches... then remember to set up the wifi access points as Adhoc mode.. as this is the correct most reliable efficient mode for this type of connection.... I believe some use the Apple Airport express products for this... they are cheap and reliable, but somewhat old technology now.

I had a similar problem when I started working from home regularly, the wifi although full bars and strong as an ox apparently kept dropping out, which was a pain.

To Maplins - two recessed wall mount sockets, 2 x Cat 5 fascia plates, a length of cable long enough and a box of cable things to nail it to the outside of the wall. Cost about £20, but tbh I lifted the Cat 5 cable from a roll of spare at work with a nod & a wink from the IT mgr & good chum.

Fitting the wall boxes & plates was easy, drill a few holes into the wall to the right depth to describe the outline, and a few mins knocking out the plaster & top edge of the concrete breeze blocks, tidy it all off and screw A to B and C to A where A is the wall box, B is the wall and C is the fascia plate. Connecting it up was a doddle - the right tool for the job is a must to push the wires in to the back of the sockets, a couple of quid from Maplin again and the colour guide easily found on the net, or in the connectors themselves for mine. Make a tidy job of running the cable round the outside of the house and Bob's yer uncle. All you need then are a couple of ethernet leads, one from router to wall plate at one end, and the same at the other to feed into whatever you have at that end. You've effectively put a long extension in, fixed to the wall. I did it at a steady pace stopping for tea and chatting, took a couple of hours start to finish and has worked flawlessly since.

It's worth getting a Gigabit switch too - this works well http://www.maplin.co.uk/p/netg...thernet-switch-a12gy

With this you have seven sockets to connect stuff to. They'e easy to fill up once you add printers, phone signal boosters, NAS drives etc, and you router should be able to support up to around 253 devices attached via ethernet & wifi. Fwiw there are three of those switches in various points of my network, they're genuine plug n play.

I've a similar issue, but to get around it I use Ethernet over power line bridge thingies.  It's a rock solid connection.  Works campion.

Trouble is those Ethernet over power line thingies tend to drop data like 'h's

Simon, I have heard that too, many times.  But it isn't markedly noticeable to me.  I have no doubt, that rewiring the house with CAT 6 cabling would ultimately be a better solution, but that isn't going to happen any time soon.  I think they're an acceptable compromise and certainly a big step up from wifi.

sure they may be a step up from an ageing  basic consumer ISP wifi - but a proper modern ESSID based wifi with multiple overlapping access points will be significantly more capable than a powerline adapter work around.

Parlow posted:

Simon, I have heard that too, many times.  But it isn't markedly noticeable to me.  I have no doubt, that rewiring the house with CAT 6 cabling would ultimately be a better solution, but that isn't going to happen any time soon.  I think they're an acceptable compromise and certainly a big step up from wifi.

Homeplug/Powerline/networking over the mains products are all effected by mains noise.

The mains passthrough socket on a Piggy (mains passthrough) homeplug unit is a mains filtering socket. What upsets homeplug is mains noise so you need to do anything you can to reduce it. One way is to use piggy homeplug units and then ensure that EVERYTHING that's mains powered near and around the homeplug unit is being powered via that mains passthrough socket on the piggy unit. So plug the piggy unit direct into the wall socket. Then take a multi-way mains strip and plug everything near into it. Then plug the mains strip into the filtered mains passthrough socket on the piggy.

I use the much older 200AV units and, helped by adopting a policy of minimising mains noise, I get a rock stable 50meg throughput. And, let's face it, getting clean mains is only a good thing anyway.

Solwisesteve, it's also worth remembering that because of the radio frequencies used by home-plug/power line adapters on the mains, radiated emissions don't just travel along the wires they radiate through the air and space in your house and will couple to other their circuitry in the RF near field... so mains filtering as you describe will typically only have a partial benefit.

Besides having inherent dropouts using wifi, you'll experience various hums and ticks in the speakers. I've also upgraded the silly stock wifi antenna and got something better off ebay, which made the connection better and faster but no way near what a decent ethernet cable can bring to the table. When using a wired connection, the wifi module gets turned off which reduces the overall noise floor. I'm using 15m of cat7 STP ethernet cable which is heavy screened for interference. Whether to get a silly expensive ethernet cable or not is another debate I'm not going to engage in.

There's no advantage to Cat7 over Cat6a SSTP or SFTP (or Cat6 for that matter, and only a very marginal case for Cat6 over Cat5e even) - don't get distracted by the number of cats, so long as it's Cat 5e or above it'll work fine with Gigabit Ethernet.

Note that if you're going to use SSTP or SFTP (i.e. screened Ethernet cables), then you need to pay attention to the grounding or you can have two ground points in your audio system and get earth loop hums and/or other earth loop induced artefacts

Dan.S posted:

Besides having inherent dropouts using wifi, you'll experience various hums and ticks in the speakers.

Are you saying you get hums and ticks as a result of using a wireless connection? Not something I've ever observed, even with a poor WiFi connection.

ChrisSU posted:

Dan.S posted:

Besides having inherent dropouts using wifi, you'll experience various hums and ticks in the speakers.

Are you saying you get hums and ticks as a result of using a wireless connection? Not something I've ever observed, even with a poor WiFi connection.

I think he's saying these can result from the use of Homeplug (and similar) Ethernet over mains wiring solutions.

I'm not saying that Huge. I'm saying increased noise floor and occasionally popping sounds from the tweeters when using wifi (on a SU). Only audible at night when it's quiet in the room.