Network connection for Lina Dac

In no way am I “picking” on @struts001 or his reply here - it’s just that he has replied with something that is actually really relevant and kicks off a bit more discussion so, @struts001, please take this as a truly positive response to your posting (and a thank you from me for a good reply that raises discussion points) and not a negative one…

For anyone in a domestic environment, no matter how much streaming or gaming your family do, you really don’t NEED anything more than your ISPs router and basic unmanaged switches (@struts001’s “meat and spuds” switches are absolutely fine)… in fact getting expensive managed switches and other similar “pro” network kit can cause far more challenges and issues than it solves.

What you actually need is kit that works correctly and you simply run a network cable to everything that has an Ethernet port leaving WiFi for those devices whose manufacturers have been “brave” and have eschewed any form of physical connection for the lawless frontier “wild west” world of wireless - game over, lets go home via the pub and the chippy!

Of course it’s not that simple, there are a few other things that come into play here.

  1. I CAN’T run a network cable. (Note : This is usually more accurately “I don’t want to go to the hassle of running a network cable”.)

  2. I want to use wireless.

  3. I want to play with my network.

I’ll be absolutely honest and say that I come into group 3 (as, I suspect, does @struts001) … I have a Ubiquiti DreamMachine as a router and a couple of additional Unifi WiFi access points to cover the house and garden but I don’t currently use Unifi Switches - all my switches are NetGear GS or TP-Link - but I do have physical network cable links to the kitchen, downstairs “cloakroom” (where my NAS, printer and other network servers reside), living room, hallway (where my broadband connection physically comes in) and loft, from the loft there are feeds into each bedroom and into the upstairs hallway for a ceiling mounted access point, there’s also an Ethernet feed out to the garden shed for a backup NAS and garden WiFi access point.

The issues that people have (which then eventually become “networking is a black art and I need to spend lots of money to make it work right” and enshrined in internet networking lore) generally come down to not wanting to do things right or using kit that doesn’t actually work correctly.

The only “known” environment you’ll generally come across in domestic / consumer networking is a length of network cable - it has known properties that can be tested and verified and kit is built around working with that known environment and a system can be built around network cables and network switches and you’ll know that it will work unless you’ve messed things up. Ethernet networking is not a “black art” … it is so far from being a black art that it makes an IKEA Kallax storage unit look like brain surgery while parachuting … networking is incredibly tightly defined by documentation and RFCs that specify in the most minute detail how everything is to work, talk to each other and otherwise function correctly.

(Of course if a manufacturer is a bit lax interpreting those RFCs then that is somewhere issues can arise…)

As soon as you start using “uncontrolled” media for extending your network - and by that I mean things like mesh networks, ethernet over mains, ethernet over coax etc. - then you really have lost all control of what your network does and how it will perform.

WiFi (for example) is totally at the mercy of your environment so “fixing bad WiFi” by just putting in a WiFi repeater / extender and not understanding what the actual cause of the “bad WiFi” is is like going to the doctors and him simply handing you a prescription for paracetamol without even seeing you or talking to you.

As an example, I used to live in an annexe to a bigger house and I couldn’t even get WiFi from one room to the next - it turns out that when the annexe was refurbished it was insulated with foil faced Cellotex but they also used that same foil faced Cellotex to construct / insulate the internal walls and partitions so there was no significant WiFi interference from outside (YAY!) but also your own WiFi couldn’t get between rooms, even mobile phone reception was pants unless you were by a window!

Similarly Ethernet over mains should be treated with extreme caution - it NEVER reaches its advertised speed anyway so your 1Gig EOM devices might hit 500meg if you’re lucky, they also work like the old style network hubs (or even like “WiFi down a pipe”) so data collisions are commonplace and this is really bad for “serious gaming” (does anyone else find that to be an oxymoron?) - Ethernet over mains devices have caused me so much grief over the years!

It always amuses (?) me that when trying to diagnose networking issues where people have used wireless extenders or Ethernet over mains devices the first thing I’ll ask (out of experience) is to take those devices out of the equation by temporarily running a network cable and that is almost always greeted with “I can’t do that…” (or similar) “… what else can we check instead?”

The other thing that I have intense suspicion of is ISP supplied routers and their accompanying network extenders … ISPs don’t give you a router because it’s a good router, they give you it so that they only have to produce one set of diagnosis scripts for their “tech support” staff to work through and if you don’t use their kit then you are on your own. It’s produced down to a cost so that it can be given away free (on the whole) and when ISPs actually advertise that if your WiFi is bad then they’ll give you up to four WiFi extender discs for free too then that just shows that they are really not producing a properly designed and thought through solution. I’ve seen too many ISP supplied routers that work to a point and then once they get a bit swamped with traffic they curl up and go and cry in the corner until they’re rebooted…

So, just to be absolutely clear, you DON’T need anything special in the way of network kit to stream audio, streaming audio over a network generally takes up a fraction of a percent (maybe 0.2% for CD bitrate FLAC) of your typical gigabit network bandwidth … you just need kit that works, follows the really very well defined rules and is reliable!

I shall discretely avoid getting involved in the conversation about audiophile network switches and audiophile ethernet cables… :slight_smile:

P

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