@audphile1 Funny, you are the one trying to describe buffering and caching as two different things.
It's your streamer, not your modem
So many discussions I've seen lately have been about upgrading Internet devices, especially the modems and routers to get the best possible audio. Audiogoners are talking about installing 10 GigE (10 Gigabits per second) cable for signals that barely need 10 megabits per second. Three full orders of magnitude more bandwidth than required by hi resolution audio. (192 k/24 bit)
I've also seen discussions about home Internet getting a little higher latency and jitter.
None of this should matter with a decent streamer. Let me give you an example. Because my work requires me to be online with high reliability I have two different Internet providers and a switch that detects failure in one and switches me to another.
It takes the switch approximately 40 seconds to detect the Internet is down and fail over to the other. 40 seconds. 40,000 milliseconds. For this testing I shut the modem off. In that moment, for the next 40 seconds, I had no working Internet. Then my back-up 5G Internet took over. About 3 minutes after that my primary Internet's modem has rebooted and my router has recognized it as available and switched back over.
During the testing I coincidentally had Roon playing a random Jazz selection.
Not once did my audio stop. Not even a hiccup.
Why? Buffering. Roon had gotten the entire song and doled it out to my end point a little at a time.
Point is, modem quality, router quality, switches, and Ethernet cables don't matter that much. What does is the size of the buffer and the effectiveness of the anti-jitter circuitry in the DAC.
I do by the way recommend shielded cables, Ethernet isolators and gas discharge surge protectors, but sweat a modem or router? Not me.
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Finally, someone understands how it works. I learned this stuff in the '80's when I was setting up computer networks between mainframes, mini computers and POS systems. IOW, this isn't a new concept. I don't know where all this new talk of latency and jitter is coming from. The transmission of data is not where those things would happen. It seems audiophiles always have to invent a new problem in order to have an excuse to buy more equipment to fix it. |
@jssmith - I could see lesser streamers with poor designs being more subject to upstream issues. The writing into and the reading from the cache has to happen without the system tripping over itself, and then there is also decompression of FLAC, ALAC or mpx (mp3, mp4, etc) formats. Writing non-blocking IO code for embedded systems really is an art form, so I could see a hastily put together system with limited CPU resources and very little stress testing performing exceptionally poorly, but my home router isn't going to make things much better. To be clear, a Raspberry Pi 3 could do this really well, so this should not require server class hardware to do this. It does require engineering attention. |
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