ISP and Sound Quality


So last week I picked up T-Mobile's Wi-Fi and Mesh network along with my wife's new phone.  Apparently, this is a new venture for T-Mobile.  I thought I would give it a try and see how it works, as I am on Xfinity at the moment.  

I was absolutely shocked at the improvement in sound quality with the T-Mobile setup.  I have two subwoofers per side and I immediately overloaded the room with bass.  That never happened before.  I had to turn the level down on the crossover.  

Streaming music from Tidal with Roon was clean, crisp, and sounding alive.  By comparison, on Xfinity the sound was mushy and dull.  It wasn't bad sound on Xfinity, but moving to T-Mobile was sure an eye opener.  Interestingly, Xfinity just upgraded my modem a couple of months ago, too. 

I checked the signal level at the BlueSound Node, but the levels were the same between the two ISP's..  But when I checked the data transfer, the T-Mobile had a 32% increase in speed over Xfinity.  

The sound from both ISP's were on Wi-Fi.  In the past, I did run a Ethernet 6e cable for a hard wire connection from the Xfinity modem to the Node but that didn't seem to make much of a difference, if any.  I did the same yesterday with the T-Mobile but again, not much difference, if any.  I didn't check the speed with the cable, I should do that just for the data point.

Has anyone else experienced this?  Is all this just from the bandwidth speed increase?  If so, I might have to go back to T-Mobile and ask for an increase!

128x128spatialking

Depends on the speeds you were getting, and how many other devices you have on the network, and whether you have wifi channel contention or not.

If your Xfinity was constrained (weird) but TMobile was not then you may haver reached the pinnacle of throughput already.

I use a wired connection for my day job, and T-Mobile as a backup. My router switches between them as necessary. I have to say I’ve not had a problem with T-mobile, and my music doesn’t sound magically better when I am on or off it, but when my landline goes down, of course, it sounds terrible. :D

Honestly though, unless your streaming service was severely speed limited, which could happen for a variety of reasons, including routing, I’d expect most streamers to easily handle a variety of upstream situations thanks to buffering. If your streamer is "sensitive" to cable providers, it may be worthwhile getting a new streamer.

A better "tell" for this kind of problem is video streaming.  It takes more bandwidth and more clearly visible (literally) when it's slow.  Compare how long it takes your video to start streaming at high resolution with each provider. 

Good idea.  I will switch video over this evening and see how it compares. 

The only thing on either network was the music I was streaming.  Desktop was sleeping and the laptop was off. 

Also, use a Wifi analyzer.  They are free apps for your phone/tablet that show you your wifi neighborhood.  You can ensure you have a strong wifi signal AND move your router channel to the channel with the least competition.