Quote:
Originally Posted by clpetersen
...But the symptoms you describe are hard to assign to a digital cable.
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I'm in need of further advice from you streaming experts. I did replace the router, and it appears to be working great -- upload and download speeds consistently over 400 Mbps over the wired Ethernet LAN that I'm using, and ping delays around 10 ms. I also did a factory reset on the Node 2i, which might have eliminated the "crackling" that I reported earlier, but not the occasional brief dropouts. You folks have much more experience than I, so maybe you can help me sort out the remaining issues:
This morning I'm listening to a series of 24-bit by 48 kHz cuts from Qobuz and have already heard at least two brief dropouts. Note that this bit rate is a factor of 4 below the top-rated speed of these devices and that even a 24-bit by 192 hHz stream would require less than 10 Mbps of Internet speed! It seems I may have a much more global problem that I had suspected. I'm beginning to wonder if all of my problems are coming from short-term dropouts in my Internet service (or a local Qobuz server). New questions arising out of this speculation:
1) Is there a way to test an ISP's streaming performance over long-enough times to detect and quantify these very occasional dropouts? (I suppose this might be either a piece of software or a "black box" that one connects to the LAN.) First and foremost, I need to determine the true origin of my problems!
2) Is the buffer in the Node 2i too small to cover the Internet dropouts that I might be experiencing? I've seen no specs on buffer sizes in BlueSound devices, but I suppose there's a compromise to be made between cost and dropouts. Are other streamers designed with larger buffers for this purpose? Or are there "outboard" buffers that can be purchased to ameliorate this kind of problem? (I suppose the ultimate solution to ISP dropouts is to purchase and download to hard drive all the music I want to listen to, but this is expensive, cumbersome, and defeats the main advantage of streaming.)
Explanations or suggestions would be most welcome. -- Clark2