Ethernet Routers for Audio

[Zardoz]

9 hours ago, PCOWandre said:

I was going to try to add an arty snapshot of some happy home fibre, but it's cramped and bloody dark in the back of the rack, so you can have this poorly lit blur-pocalypse instead:

<epic phat fibre switch image>

Curious to know more about this box. Looks like 10G. Noisy?

 

My "audio" needs when it comes to switching and routing is something that doesn't sound like a jet engine.  That means the 40GbE switch that I would dearly love to kick into production is sitting on the floor collecting dust.  The house is such that I don't have a single space where loud, screeching fans can't be heard from a nearby room where either sleeping, or audio listening takes place.  Plan is to ensure the next place has a garage with sufficient space to drop an APC NetShelter CX in there and then I'm sorted, but until then, it's a 3750X with 2x10G and as I move further into 4K/8K video and moving large VMs around, gigabit quickly becomes a frustrating bottleneck.  I have a Cisco 2921 that I modded with Noctua fans and sits in a cupboard.  They're cheap enough that if I do fry the box somehow, I can get another one for loose change, but this will be an issue when I want to move to faster Internet; the 4451s can't be modded as easily.

 

[BugPowderDust]

4 hours ago, PCOWandre said:

For less money on ebay:

Most would love that jet plane rush in the house. I remember when a supervisor

module for one of these was in excess of $120k aud. Not bad buying these days but there are more elegant solutions now.

 

i’ve always been more partial to Arista personally. I used to work at Cisco in years gone by and have sold a mountain of it over the years, but the elegance of Arista’s switching platform is next level.

 

i’ve spent a bunch of time at their labs and with people like Andy and Jayshree on a number of EBCs they hosted for us. Lincoln Dale (a local switching legend) was also working there before he moved to Google as a network architect and now AWS as a principal engineer.

 

i really should ping Lincoln to put his 2c in this thread. He’s knowledgeable well past Ethernet and deep into the asic design on these beasts. I’m sure his perspective would be interesting to say the least.

[Gabehcuod]

Explain to me how I can download a lossless song over the internet, using WiFi out of an old router and it is still guaranteed to be bit-perfect.

If you can explain that, then you'll know the benefits of "audiophile routers" are non-existent.

Now I don't mind my fair share of snake oil, but this is going beyond the realm of possibility.

[Guest rmpfyf]

4 hours ago, Zardoz said:

Curious to know more about this box. Looks like 10G. Noisy?

 

My "audio" needs when it comes to switching and routing is something that doesn't sound like a jet engine.  That means the 40GbE switch that I would dearly love to kick into production is sitting on the floor collecting dust.  The house is such that I don't have a single space where loud, screeching fans can't be heard from a nearby room where either sleeping, or audio listening takes place.  Plan is to ensure the next place has a garage with sufficient space to drop an APC NetShelter CX in there and then I'm sorted, but until then, it's a 3750X with 2x10G and as I move further into 4K/8K video and moving large VMs around, gigabit quickly becomes a frustrating bottleneck.  I have a Cisco 2921 that I modded with Noctua fans and sits in a cupboard.  They're cheap enough that if I do fry the box somehow, I can get another one for loose change, but this will be an issue when I want to move to faster Internet; the 4451s can't be modded as easily.

 

 

I share your 'stuff I can no longer have in this house' pain  

[Guest rmpfyf]

1 hour ago, Gabehcuod said:

Explain to me how I can download a lossless song over the internet, using WiFi out of an old router and it is still guaranteed to be bit-perfect.

If you can explain that, then you'll know the benefits of "audiophile routers" are non-existent.

Now I don't mind my fair share of snake oil, but this is going beyond the realm of possibility.

 

Read up, it's mentioned earlier in the thread.

If there's anything to optimise it's not for data integrity.

 

This said, some 'audiophile' cable vendors insist it's so... which is ridiculous, and deserves the comment you've just made (and then some).

 

Case in point...

 

Edited September 16, 2020 by rmpfyf

[Rosco8]

On 13/09/2020 at 5:31 PM, Stereophilus said:

I’m looking at getting a mesh wifi router for my house.  Looking at something like this:

 

https://www.asus.com/au/Networking/ZenWiFi-AX-XT8/

 

I chose this one as it has QoS.

 

My question is, would this be any worse for audio, compared to say a purely Ethernet router, like a Ubiquiti Edge?

 

I plan to use it connected directly to the NBN modem, and then using a ethernet from one of the LAN ports to the music room.  The mesh wifi is for everything else in the house.

 

Any thoughts?

 

I did the same thing this week but with a Orbi AX6000 and have the existing switches all plugged in  .. very quick ..  video and audio is great, no lagging or noticeable buffering which i was having, especially on video ...  the ASUS is also half the price of the Orbi which is great value    Mesh eliminated all the dead spots which i had covered with additional access points and extenders which i removed.  Initially had a DHCP conflict with the existing Load Balancing router but once we removed it and simplified the network onto the Orbi all is good.  Notice the ASUS, as does the Orbi do have the odd compatibility issues with some devices.  Happy chappy now and recommend Mesh.

Edited September 16, 2020 by Rosco8

[:) Go Away (:]

8 minutes ago, Rosco8 said:

Initially had a DHCP conflict with the existing Load Balancing router but once we removed it and simplified the network onto the Orbi all is good.

Orbi is really great. I had the same issue with DHCP, but in my case I changed the Orbi's device mode as access point instead of router and kept my existing pfsense box as router with DHCP server. Works a treat. 

[:) Go Away (:]

36 minutes ago, rmpfyf said:

Case in point...

 

Good video, but little misleading in saying that there is only one chance at getting the audio through cable and there is no resent for missing bits. Everytime one streams audio/video there is a little buffer at the receiver end, and if the buffer isn't enough with all the bits, it simply won't play and either pause for it to complete or errors out. Faster network would improve this with less waiting time at the buffer end and smoother playback.

 

[Rosco8]

On 13/09/2020 at 7:40 PM, Stereophilus said:

I think another WAP will work, I just thought I’d upgrade the other 3 WAPs at the same time... so price compared to the XT8 became a lot closer.

 

Aside from this, and back onto something closer to the topic, does separating wireless routing duties from the wired router offer any benefit (audio specific or otherwise)?  Or is it ok to have 1 device doing all the routing?

I am with you ... with multiple WAPS and extenders I still had issues, primarily with external monitoring device uploads.  Running more Cat 6 to external points and adding external (or ceiling edge) WAPs probably would have solved it but how much gear and complexity do you want to add for a single house ?  is it adding bandwidth inefficiencies ?  I have a long house and a large work shed 30m up my back yard (test shows shed reception is 93% signal and 162 Mbps) on a small acreage.  The 2 device Mesh simplified all the peripheral gear I had running and I now have great coverage across my house and block, the only limitations is NBN, when we built as per NBN recommendation we ran additional conduit 65m for the Labour Govt promised NBN fibre connection, so even with a new subdivision under LNP they ran copper to the house, thank you Mr Murdoch for degrading our countries Network, at least we now have fibre to the curb.  For me Mesh is worth the additional cost, is it overkill, probably.  The Mesh router also manages the wired network.

[PCOWandre]

6 hours ago, Zardoz said:

Curious to know more about this box. Looks like 10G. Noisy?

Brocade Silkworm 300. Fibre channel, 8 gig. There is no greater (storage) joy than SAN booting all your workstations.

[Guest rmpfyf]

49 minutes ago, :) Go Away (: said:

Good video, but little misleading in saying that there is only one chance at getting the audio through cable and there is no resent for missing bits. Everytime one streams audio/video there is a little buffer at the receiver end, and if the buffer isn't enough with all the bits, it simply won't play and either pause for it to complete or errors out. Faster network would improve this with less waiting time at the buffer end and smoother playback.

 

 

It's a highly misleading video.

 

There's stuff to be had in optimising networks for best audio playback but on the sort of drivel in that video I can understand the tone of @Gabehcuod's reaction - I'd think it quite restrained, actually.

[Assisi]

4 hours ago, Gabehcuod said:

Explain to me how I can download a lossless song over the internet, using WiFi out of an old router and it is still guaranteed to be bit-perfect.

If you can explain that, then you'll know the benefits of "audiophile routers" are non-existent.

Now I don't mind my fair share of snake oil, but this is going beyond the realm of possibility.

I cannot provide an answer to your conundrum.   What is your perception of my conundrums? There are more things than just the whether correct bits are present and perfect.

 

 

A few years ago, I swapped over to the NBN from an ADSL service because I had to.  Fine it works well.  I ended up with a new faster router.  After a few days of the NBN I perceived a small but perceptible improvement in system playback.  Why?  At the time nothing else had changed in my system.  I had no idea but the benefit was there.  I asked people who know about these things.  The answer was that my home network would be faster and that network interrupts would happen faster.  So, components would spend more time doing what they were supposed to be doing and not responding to the router.  This may or may not be correct.  The definite thing is that something beneficial happened for network.  The files did not alter because of the NBN.

 

 

I now have audio quality network switches.  Two are 5V DC powered.  They came with smps and the switches provided a benefit.  Yesterday I powered both with a quality LPS.  Immediately there was a noticeable beneficial improvement in SQ.  Why?  The file going through the switches was not different.

 

 

There is more to network switches and cables than you might be willing to acknowledge.  You may be surprised if you tried

 

John

Edited September 17, 2020 by Assisi

[davewantsmoore]

3 hours ago, :) Go Away (: said:

Good video, but little misleading in saying that there is only one chance at getting the audio through cable and there is no resent for missing bits

"A little misleading"   ?!?!?!?

 

LOL LOL LOL

He may as well be telling people up is down.

[Zardoz]

5 hours ago, recur said:

Most would love that jet plane rush in the house. I remember when a supervisor

module for one of these was in excess of $120k aud. Not bad buying these days but there are more elegant solutions now.

 

i’ve always been more partial to Arista personally. I used to work at Cisco in years gone by and have sold a mountain of it over the years, but the elegance of Arista’s switching platform is next level.

 

i’ve spent a bunch of time at their labs and with people like Andy and Jayshree on a number of EBCs they hosted for us. Lincoln Dale (a local switching legend) was also working there before he moved to Google as a network architect and now AWS as a principal engineer.

 

i really should ping Lincoln to put his 2c in this thread. He’s knowledgeable well past Ethernet and deep into the asic design on these beasts. I’m sure his perspective would be interesting to say the least.

 

I recall Lincoln Dale loaning me some Cisco Nexus 5K gear (when it was new) to run some LAN gaming events with. 

 

Hearing some great names being dropped in this thread  

[bigev]

Hi,

 

I have only joined this forum recently and was curious when I read in one of the classified pages I believe, the sale of 'audio ethernet cables'. Now, I do not have an in-depth knowledge of all audio gear available in the market as it is not my expertise.

 

Are we talking just standard, TCP/IP over Ethernet networks here? If so I would assume that the payload (audio) is being processed and transmitted by a computer via an application and received by a dedicated unit such as a DAC (which also runs an application) or even, another computer that is acting as a receiver and ultimately the DAC.

 

If this is the case then any networking equipment that you can purchase for the home in 2020 will more than suffice. Get it from BigW, JB HiFi, wherever. It has zero influence on audio quality. No need to spend big bucks, install racks, powering the rack, then cooling, and the noise and the ugliness. Cheap(er) equipment may not handle more than two devices transmitting at a 'high throughput' but, really, that would only influence the buffer on the receiving end. Increase the buffer size. It would never impact audio quality.

 

If your home network demands more throughput with less buffering (throttling ultimately) then get higher grade gear. Same if you want more wireless coverage.

 

Is there something obvious I have missed here?

[PCOWandre]

19 minutes ago, bigev said:

Is there something obvious I have missed here?

Nope. Other than the marketing prowess of certain companies and their desire to build new markets for their products. And yes, it is all standard TCP. 

 

In a lot of cases, the HiFi industry is a shrinking market. New product categories are needed to drive growth, and thus .. thousand dollar ethernet cables indeed. DIRECTIONAL ethernet cables at that. 

[pwstereo]

45 minutes ago, bigev said:

Is there something obvious I have missed here?

A fanatical devotion to the pope arcane mumbo jumbo.

 

Apologies to Monty Python.

[PCOWandre]

Could always see if you can get your cables blessed, I suppose. Might have to be careful about your choice of music.

[pwstereo]

Aussie bands, The Angels, and GOD would be approved I'm sure.

[evil c]

2 hours ago, Assisi said:

I cannot provide an answer to your conundrum.   What is your perception of my conundrums? There are more things than just the whether correct bits are present and perfect.

 

 

A few years ago, I swapped over to the NBN from an ADSL service because I had to.  Fine it works well.  I ended up with a new faster router.  After a few days of the NBN I perceived a small but perceptible improvement in system playback.  Why?  At the time nothing else had changed in my system.  I had no idea but the benefit was there.  I asked people who know about these things.  The answer was that my home network would be faster and that network interrupts would happen faster.  So, components would spend more time doing what they were supposed to be doing and not responding to the router.  This may or may not be correct.  The definite thing is that something beneficial happened for network.  The files did not alter because of the NBN.

 

 

I now have audio quality network switches.  Two are 5V DC powered.  They came with smps and the switches provided a benefit.  Yesterday I powered both with a quality LPS.  Immediately there was a noticeable beneficial improvement in SQ.  Why?  The file going through the switches was not different.

 

 

There is more to network switches and cables than you might be willing to acknowledge.  You may be surprised if you tried

 

John

Very good explanation and insight John, unfortunately at least half of the population lack the ability of open mindedness - so best to not feed them!

[BugPowderDust]

1 hour ago, bigev said:

Is there something obvious I have missed here?

Not really. Nothing Occam's Razor couldn't have fixed first.

 

[Assisi]

8 minutes ago, recur said:

Not really. Nothing Occam's Razor couldn't have fixed first.

 

Occam's Razor discounts a given explanation for events doesn't prove that explanation right or wrong, it's just a useful guideline. ... On the other hand, reality is sufficiently complex that sometimes explanations are complex.

 

In this instance of the divergence of relative experience and opinion, I do not think it would have resolved anything.

 

John

[Rosco8]

I am now intrigued about how these Music Servers stream and to how loss of data is managed or not  ..  its been a while since I have researched into Networking protocols so you may already know all about this one ... if so my apology ..  hopefully some will find it interesting ... as a keen TIDAL user I did some searching and this is where I found the reference that Tidal uses QUIC ... if I understand simplistically it builds on UDP and adds the transport layer at the application layer ... its widely implemented, including Google, Microsoft and used by companies such as Akami.  Now this may be right or wrong that its being used by Tidal  ...   the video is interesting as it covers TCP, UDP and earlier development by Google of QUIC. 

 

Wikipedia ...

 

QUIC aims to be nearly equivalent to a TCP connection but with much-reduced latency. It does this primarily through two changes that rely on the understanding of the behaviour of HTTP traffic.^[17]

 

The first change is to greatly reduce overhead during connection setup. As most HTTP connections will demand TLS, QUIC makes the exchange of setup keys and supported protocols part of the initial handshake process. When a client opens a connection, the response packet includes the data needed for future packets to use encryption. This eliminates the need to set up the TCP connection and then negotiate the security protocol via additional packets. Other protocols can be serviced in the same way, combining together multiple steps into a single request-response. This data can then be used both for following requests in the initial setup, as well as future requests that would otherwise be negotiated as separate connections.^[17]

 

QUIC uses UDP as its basis, which does not include loss recovery. Instead, each QUIC stream is separately flow controlled and lost data retransmitted at the level of QUIC, not UDP. This means that if an error occurs in one stream, the protocol stack can continue servicing other streams independently. This can be very useful in improving performance on error-prone links, as in most cases considerable additional data may be received before TCP notices a packet is missing or broken, and all of this data is blocked or even flushed while the error is corrected. In QUIC, this data is free to be processed while the single multiplexed stream is repaired.^[18]

 

QUIC includes a number of other more mundane changes that also improve overall latency and throughput. For instance, the packets are encrypted individually, so that they do not result in the encrypted data waiting for partial packets. This is not generally possible under TCP, where the encryption records are in a bytestream and the protocol stack is unaware of higher-layer boundaries within this stream. These can be negotiated by the layers running on top, but QUIC aims to do all of this in a single handshake process.^[8]

 

Another goal of the QUIC system was to improve performance during network-switch events, like what happens when a user of a mobile device moves from a local WiFi hotspot to a mobile network. When this occurs on TCP, a lengthy process starts where every existing connection times out one-by-one and is then re-established on demand. To solve this problem, QUIC includes a connection identifier which uniquely identifies the connection to the server regardless of source. This allows the connection to be re-established simply by sending a packet, which always contains this ID, as the original connection ID will still be valid even if the user's IP address changes.^[19]

 

QUIC can be implemented in the application-space, as opposed to being in the operating system kernel. This generally invokes additional overhead due to context switches as data is moved between applications. However, in the case of QUIC, the protocol stack is intended to be used by a single application, with each application using QUIC having its own connections hosted on UDP. Ultimately the difference could be very small because much of the overall HTTP/2 stack is already in the applications (or their libraries, more commonly). Placing the remaining parts in those libraries, essentially the error correction, has little effect on the HTTP/2 stack's size or overall complexity.^[8]

 

This organization allows future changes to be made more easily as it does not require changes to the kernel for updates. One of QUIC's longer-term goals is to add new systems for forward error correction (FEC) and improved congestion control.^[19]

 

 

 

Edited September 17, 2020 by Rosco8

[PCOWandre]

QUIC always come across (to me) as another dose of Google hegemony and part of their love of destroying simplicity and burying everything knee-deep in proprietary goo that is just "open" enough to play the Open card. 

 

One of the truly beautiful things about HTTP was the simplicity. It wasn't hard to build a basic HTTP stack and it certainly wasn't hard for anyone to debug problems armed with telnet alone. 

 

HTTP/2 was pretty much a failure, with the cases where it should have made a big improvement often yielding a net decrease in performance. 

 

This rant captures a lot of the vibe for me:

 

https://www.roguelazer.com/2020/07/etcd-or-why-modern-software-makes-me-sad/

 

That's certainly not to say I can't see what they're trying to do or why they're trying to do it -- it just feels like another wave of complexity that caters to the operators of large decentralised advertising networks at the expense of smaller operators, network simplicity and transparency. 

Easy to avoid QUICC, though - just force use of an http proxy and it'll have to fall back to http/https.

[Rosco8]

20 minutes ago, PCOWandre said:

QUIC always come across (to me) as another dose of Google hegemony and part of their love of destroying simplicity and burying everything knee-deep in proprietary goo that is just "open" enough to play the Open card. 

One of the truly beautiful things about HTTP was the simplicity. It wasn't hard to build a basic HTTP stack and it certainly wasn't hard for anyone to debug problems armed with telnet alone. 

This rant captures a lot of the vibe for me:

https://www.roguelazer.com/2020/07/etcd-or-why-modern-software-makes-me-sad/

That's certainly not to say I can't see what they're trying to do or why they're trying to do it -- it just feels like another wave of complexity that caters to the operators of large decentralised advertising networks at the expense of smaller operators, network simplicity and transparency. 

Yeh, I get it ...

 

I saw that there were already 4 thread versions which means 4 sets of devs doing their thing ... reminds me of SQL .. everyone adding their own enhancements trying to lock you in ... destroys the concept of open standards ....   it can still be done within a standards framework and SGML (XML borrowed a lot from SGML) is an example where in the aeronautical world, the 3 core standards being FIXM (flight), AIXM (aero ground) and WXXM (weather) they defined localized (user defined) extension frameworks so you can effectively add on what you wanted by country, which was needed because Internationally countries have differences and as an example getting a dozen European countries to agree with the USA is nigh impossible and vice versa  ..  however it all used the same syntax and is textual so can be read easily and harmonisation forums were put in place to ensure no duplication and that the extensions made sense.

 

Still some clever stuff in QUIC ..  2 edged swords ...