Never Know What to Expect

[djmt]

Our apartment layout and location of the router means my computer ethernet connection is through an ethernet over power adapter. This has always worked well connection wise but there was always a bit of electrical noise noticeable in between songs when wearing headphones. I just thought this was the price paid for such a set up. 

 

In preparation for a streamer I ordered, I had to change the adapter to one that would accommodate multiple connections. After waiting 10 days for the streamer to make the one hour trip from Sydney to the Central Coast, I gave up and cancelled the order.

 

Now to the point of all this. The next time I listened with the headphones on a sleepless night, I could not believe my ears. No noise at all and the improvement to every part of the sound was unbelievable. Thinking this might be due to a 2:00 am listening session, I couldn't wait to power up everything the next day. Same result. Much better everything.  

 

The original adapter was a d-link and the new one a tp-link. As far as I'm aware they have the same spec other than accommodating 3 connections rather than a single one. The new adapter is much larger for what thats worth.

 

It's one of the best improvements I've made and was purely by accident.

Edited July 30, 2020 by djmt
Grammar

[wen]

interesting, when asking google the difference, said that the tp is a cheaper version of the d, ?

[mjs]

Interesting experience here with EoP, bit of a long story, but here goes.
 

We have a split level house (3 levels), internet connection to the study at the front of the house (mid level) with an upper level music room in the middle of the house and the downstairs tv/family area at the back of the house. The main router is in the front study. The downstairs and upstairs areas were both extended quite a few years ago, sadly without Ethernet cabling, and there were a few devices both upstairs and downstairs that needed to be hooked up.  So I decided to try EoP and installed four Netgear NP506 Powerlines adaptors putting one in the study, one in the music room, one in the downstairs tv area and one in an upstairs bedroom. They all talked to each other nicely and coverage was great. The Netgear adaptors seemed about the best you could get at the time.
 

However, a few years ago we got solar panels and for some reason that stuffed the whole thing up, whether the phases were changed or there was more noise on the line, not sure, but none of the receiving adaptors would link effectively back to the study. So, I had lost connectivity to the majority of the house. Fortunately that was partly solved by getting a pair of newer Netgear NP507 adaptors, a faster 600 Mbps model. They worked ok as a pair to the music area, but I couldn’t get them to work to the downstairs area. I then gave up on EoP further into the house and added another router as an access point in the music room and that sort of gave reasonable wifi to the rest of the back of the house. Wasn’t great though, as it struggled streaming movies to the TV.
 

Final solution installed a year or so ago was to swap the second router for an Orbi base station as an access point, with the Orbi sattelite in the downstairs TV area. Wasn’t cheap but it works a treat. Regularly get 600Mbps speed in the LAN, sometimes more. Downstairs now has TV, Foxtel, Oppo, AppleTV and Sonos ARC connected and upstairs has Mac Mini, AppleTV, Oppo, Auralic Vega G2.1 and Sangean DAB+ tuner connected, in each case using a 5 or 8 port gigabit switch plugged into the Orbi to give me enough ports. Can stream movies and photos from a NAS In the study to the TV via Plex, and stream hi-rez music from the NAS to pretty much everywhere else via Roon or just to the Vega via Lightning DS or Roon, including Tidal of course. Pretty happy with performance and connectivity. At last count, I think there are over twenty devices connected in the home network!
 

I see that Netgear now have newer Powerline adaptors up to 2000Mbps, so the technology keeps on improving. I guess other manufacturers have similar products, but I’ve been pretty happy with the Netgear stuff, including routers and switches.