@nyev is your amp plugged into the PSM156? Reason I’m asking is, when I had this power conditioner I noticed a very significant reduction in dynamics. I always had the amp plugged into the wall outlet because of it. Even the DAC and preamp were affected. I ended up selling the PSM156 and I have everything plugged into the wall now. I would at least try running the amp directly from the wall for a week or so. See what happens.
Effect of Internet Service Quality on Streaming?
I’ve struggled for a long time with sound getting much, much worse around dinner time, and in some rare cases I don’t get depth, clarity, dynamics and imaging back until around midnight.
Like many people I’ve attributed this to noise on my AC lines. But recently I’ve been wondering if maybe internet service quality is at least contributing to the issue in some manner. When I run tests it appears that speed, jitter, and latency are all higher at times when the sound is poor.
That got me wondering if anyone knows whether one type of internet service is better than another for HiFi streaming? For example, is ADSL or DSL better, or does it matter? And what about speed?
Particularly interested in anyone who has real world experiences from experimenting in this area…
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@audphile1 , I used to have the amp plugged into the PSM156 but have been running it into the wall directly for some time now, in a dedicated 20A line. While I prefer it plugged into the wall, I didn’t actually experience any loss of dynamics, end like now, the sound quality would occasionally dip very low. As I mentioned I’ve tried a number of conditioners none of which helped with this issue. |
I tried the battery experiment for one day, and I should try it again for a longer period and with different amps - but I was not aware of a change in sound quality. I was using my AGD Duet amps that draw about 13 watts each while listening to music, so they were well below the capacity of the EcoFlow battery (1800w, Surge 3400w). In any case, it's good to know I can still listen to music during power outages. |
There is a much better solution than cajoling your kids. Look up Quality of Service (QoS) and how to set it on your router. This will enable you to allocate bandwidth to streaming that cannot be usurped by Call of Duty or FaceTime. You don’t need to allocate a lot to streaming. Even a hi-res 192/24 stream only uses about 10 Mbs.
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Lots of good recommendations ! I had issues with streaming music versus the EXACT same album loaded on my Innuos ZENith MK3 with a Phoenix USB re-clocker. I use Qobuz which in my listening opinion sounds slightly better than Tidal. No matter what time of day though did streaming sound much better until I added in an Uptone-Audio EtherREGEN device between my Ethernet modem and the ZENith. Finally the music streamed was very close to that loaded onto the ZENith. I believe re-clocking the Ethernet signal with high-quality clocking and noise isolation from the EtherREGEN made all the difference no matter what time of day. It's the most cost-effective $-for$ I've spent for sonic improvement. My present cable internet service is ~300mbps. I will soon be going to fiber-optics with another ISP and their minimum service is ~500mbps. So, with this change I'll know if anything improves, as I will keep both running and do a direct comparison before cancelling the cable service. I'll let y'all know what I find ! In my opinion, I don't think for audio you would need any more than what I have presently for internet speed as sonically the streamed music is extremely close (splitting hairs) to that stored on my music server. |
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