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To extend Ethernet to remote location, are Powerline extenders or Mesh systems better?

I am trying to get Ethernet into a listening room that is not prewired, and it is not practical to run the hard cable through the old house into that room. I am planning to use a new music streamer that requires Ethernet connection (no wifi).

For hifi purposes, for passing the music signal, not just for computer equipment, are ethernet over powerline units better, or are wifi mesh router systems (which bring an ethernet port into a room using wireless transfer between the mesh devices) better?

For Ethernet over powerlines, I am worried about contaminating the power lines feeding the stereo preamplifier/amplifier, I don’t know if hifi power conditioners will filter out that super high frequency noise well enough.

For wifi mesh, it seems that the wireless handling of the music signal to feed the remote Ethernet port might somehow degrade the sound and introduce other problems that a connected wireline would avoid.

I am not a person that understands these technologies deeply, so I would value perspectives from others here who are users and who may be technically more qualified to understand this stuff.

troidelover1499

Showing 3 responses by yyzsantabarbara

yyzsantabarbara
4,570 posts
 

I used to have my ROON Core behind a Powerline network. I also had my living room system’s DAC streamed via this same PowerLine. I even have this PowerLine in my garage with a bunch of heavy-duty computer servers.

When the new George Harrision remaster of ALL THINGS MUST PASS in high res came out, I was getting some distortion at a particular part of a track, when George was whistling. I could ALWAYS reproduce the problem at the exact time in the music. So, this was very helpful for me to figure out the cause.

It turned out to be my ROON Core being on the PowerLine network side of my home network. I guess the Powerline’s bandwidth could not keep up to speed with the whistling bits. So, I moved the ROON Core machine to my non-Powerline part of my network and the problem was solved.

I now forgot if my living room system has this issue still, since it is on the PowerLine as a ROON-READY endpoint. I do not think so, which is interesting. I confirm this with another post.

PowerLine works for me when the ROON Core is in the non-PowerLine part of my network.

 

 

 

 

yyzsantabarbara
4,570 posts
 

My issue was related to the extra bandwidth requirements of hi-res. I had no issue in the past with non-highres. However, now I have solved the issue for highres.

yyzsantabarbara
4,570 posts
 

I am not sure about the implementation details of ROON Core but if I were to write the streaming engine for it, I would not be writing anything to disk. I would be writing to super-fast RAM for TIDAL or Qobuz and for streaming from disk-based FLAC files, I would write nothing to disk. So mostly fast reads in both cases.

WIFI should not have any issue with the CORE other than the quality of WIFI could degraded the transmission of the TCP Broadcast of the bits. Here again I am assuming the Broadcast protocol is used for ROON Rock.

WIFI is OK until the inventible when it totally fails on music streaming. This was a regular occurrence when I tested out ROON WIFI streaming with a Matrix Mini I-3 Pro DAC. It was my WIFI and not ROON that was the weak link.

 

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