Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion Meridian - Streaming Cat 5 UTP vs Cat 6 F/UTP

Rick mentioned this on the forum , described as in wall.

The TCP/IP is a very stable protocol. If there is disturbance in a packet (around 1500 bytes) a retransmission is performed. A 96/24 track needs about 5 Mbits per second. So there is a lot possibilities to retransmit a number packages. I don't doubt that the SpeakerLink interface is sensitive of cable quality (a bitstream without a parallell clock) but package oriented protocols could not be sensitive to cable. I do believe, from my own experince of TCP/IP, that a correct CAT5 cable is good enough for a zone player.

Does Sooloos subnet use full TCP/IP? Seem to recall that either RTP or UDP is used for lower level of processing required, but maybe I dreamt this.
Hector

Hector. You remember correctly.

Sooloos audio to hardware endpoints and Control:Mac/PC (but not Control:Web) use the UDP stream protocol which has no inherrent handshaking or retransmission built in. The Sooloos protocol does however do its own less granular handshaking (over a reliable TCP connection), but not on a per packet basic - more like every 10 packets. This has been broadly confirmed by 'people in the know'. It is understood that missing batches of packets can then be retransmitted but I have yet to actually see this for myself.

So theoretically, Sooloos should handle missing packets and be immune to up to approximately 8 seconds of disruption.

On top of this, there is absolutely no reason why a wired home network should not be 100% reliable, 100% of the time. Which means that retransmissions should be zero. This is the case with audio over Cat 5 or Cat 6 shielded or not.

I can only speak here on basic M components (non Sooloos) like between the 800 and 861 and 861 to DSP (with Reviver here).

The M-SpeakerLink cable is better than a regulary Cat5 industry standard cable, it's not like night and day but easy hearable.

Robert

Thanks Ian
Sanity over senility is confirmed, no lost packets yet.
Hector

Indeed: when comparing UTP cables I found that if I swapped quickly enough, the MD600 would just continue playing. I'd guess the buffer allows for about a 3 second gap.

When I wired up my apartment back in 2007, a 1,000 foot spool of dual cat 6 plus coax was very expensive. So, I opted for cat5e,and then opted for heavily shielded connectors and wall keystones. While my installer hated me, he did acknowledge that when they certified the cable, its performance was actually close to the acceptable range for cat6. Now, he could just been having me on, but it did tell me that not all cable is created or terminated equally.
So to the original poster, you could of just had a bad cable all along.

As for Meridian's push to Cat7, I like to believe it's just future proofing for when Meridian Digital Media Systems start to offer other, higher bandwidth media.

It just seems safest to go for SSTP. Maybe that is overkill for data transmission but at least you will not have to worry about RFI etc.

5.1...?

My dealer told me about 6 months ago that M was moving to Cat 7. I was having trouble sending hi res files from the TwinStore to a Control:15 using Cat 5e - it would routinely drop the signal and just leave me with noise. I put in Cat 7 cables and it has been perfect. Audioquest have a good range of terminated lengths at a reasonable price, although I agree that wiring up a whole house would be far from cheap.

Here again, I think it's your network. Is there anything else on your network, or is it just a TwinStore and C15? That just doesn't make sense. No reason that a cat5e cannot pass a high res file.