Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion Meridian - Streaming Sooloos drops out on ID41

Morning guys, I managed to get a short time playing around last night before the Mrs wanted the TV!

I put in a Netgear ProSafe 8 port switch into which I fed the network cable from C15 and network cable from ID41 and then a cable from the Netgear to the wall plug (at the moment I don't have a long enough cable to go direct to the router and this will not really be a feasible option long term anyway.

Unfortunately Sooloos played for about 5 seconds before dropping out as normal. The ID41 zone then appeared and disappeared at random for short spaces of time. What I did notice that may be relevant or not (I am not in the least bit techie) is the following. On the Netgear box, each port has two lights, a 10Mbps light and a 100Mbps light and if both are lit, it equals up to 1000Mbps.

The ports carrying the cable to the plug and from the C15 had both lights flickering away (up to 1000Mbps) whereas the port from the ID41 only ever had the one 100Mbps light on. I don't know if this is relevant to the problem I have but intuitively I think it might. Any thoughts?

Thanks,
Bernie

Dedicated Sooloos audio endpoints are only 10/100 apparently to reduce chance of high frequency noise.

What switch was it - was a it a basic unmanaged switch or was it a smart/managed switch? The latter often need configuring to work better with Sooloos so its best to go as dumb a switch as possible.

Homeplugs in my view are no longer the best way of getting ethernet around the house. Beware also, even the best age quite quickly as they are, after all, experiencing tough high voltage conditions (more so than in the USA). I have rarely had one survive more than 2 years (fortunately, they are often guaranteed for 3 years).

No doubt because of some bizarre poor quality mains wiring, there are circuits in my house (rewired fairly recently but before I bought it) where a pair of homeplugs can only achieve about 5mbps and not even that reliably. On the circuits that do seem to work reasonably well the speed is still very variable.

Hence I have moved to the latest generation of wifi (beam shaping 1900ac or better). Even with older (2.4GHz) ethernet bridge adapters on my MS200s etc and QNAP straight into the wifi router I am getting a completely stable system. Testing the wifi link using my PC on the same system (and not far from one MS200) I get 55-60mbps to my 75mbps broadband (Ookla speedtest). I was a bit wary (it was on my brother's recommendation!) but using the TP Link VR900 v2 (my brother's is a v1) it is another world compared with homeplugs. I am delighted.

By the way, Gianni, the BT HH is notoriously poor at handling multicast.