John Darko reports:

Ethernet or WiFi – which is better for high-end audio streaming?

Ethernet, right?.... Not necessarily.....

DarkLantern blog - darklanternforowen.wordpress.com

interesting ....

with my limited streaming experience (internet apps, from pc to an oppo 103 and cambridge 752), the convenience factor of wifi out-weighs any performance advantage of ethernet.

the most important piece of hardware being your router.

Hmmm.... some points to consider.

“The network router, the NAS and other network device are directly attached to the router using Ethernet cable which can be quite noisy. If the streamer is attached to the router using Ethernet cable then the noise can easily be transmitted to the streamer over this physical link. The regular CE, FCC and other EMC standards only guarantee the device will work stably, but when we are talking about sound quality, we are actually talking about EMI noise that is 1/1000 of the EMC’s standard, so it affects [sound quality] a lot. That’s why audiophiles say different NAS or different routers sound different.

Which standards are you measuring against, there are hundreds. Love the unqualified and unsupported statement that EMI of 1/1000th of any random standard affects sound quality a lot.

The Ethernet cable is [also] a big problem. It runs long and can pick up low-frequency noise which cannot be filtered out. This noise will introduce jitter at low frequencies which no PLL circuit can get rid of and it will affect sound quality a lot.

Whilst that is true of Ethernet (802.3) it is equally true of 802.11 so really you pays your money and takes your choice. Also of course a Phase-Locked Loop circuit can be tuned to do whatever you want.

WiFi will sound better if:

The engineer that designed the streamer knows how to design the WiFi module right. ‘Right’ means the module does not introduce noise to other audio circuits sharing the same ground circuit;

These are known standard NICs (Network Interface Cards), does anyone know of an audio company who actually designs and builds their own NICs?

The WiFi signal between streamer and router is strong and stable. This is because if you have a poor WiFi signal, the WiFi protocol will try to fetch the data again and again due to large error rate (Yes, we use TCP to transfer music data which has error correction). If there are too many retries, it will add additional load to the processor and potentially generate more EMI noise.

There are certain things that must use TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) such as Voice (your mobile) and Video and of course Music. It’s really important when streaming stuff that the packets arrive in the right order. Dropped packets means that the receiving device transmits a request for the dropped packet. That situation leads to latency in the network and will cause buffering to occur. You can hear that much more than a small reduction in sound quality due to EMI.

The reason that many audiophile companies claim Ethernet to sound better is that they are not capable of designing a good WiFi circuit and they have no such background knowledge (poor WiFi network). All our streamers use existing Intel WiFi modules because they work well on a Linux system and they are well designed with minimum EMI noise generation and, most importantly, we know how to design the circuit around it correctly.”

Well, no. What actually happens is that when you go from a wired (802.3) network to a wireless network (802.11) the frame size is different. This causes a recalculation on the part of the sending device for the change in frame size. Since this is a processor based calculation you can run into latency issues. This can also (because of the processor based calculations) induce more EMI. To avoid this, and to keep things simple you should maintain one medium throughout… thus the manufacturers who say Ethernet throughout.

His comment around using Intel NICs is also revealing.

Having said that, try it and see. If you can hear the difference go with whichever works for you.

I might stick with analogue

DarkLantern blog - darklanternforowen.wordpress.com

it's easier !

I luckily couldn't tell any difference between an ethernet cf wifi connection on my Bluesound Vault2. WiFi much more convenient too, and no drop outs.

The JCAT Femto might be an audiophile Network Interface Card.