You notice a more relaxed sound presentation subtle, yet clearly perceptible.
Controller Surface
Roon/Squeeze
K50
LHY SW6
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I can barely wait for the outcome.
I’m not very experienced in that.
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I have so many devices on my network that it’s unlikely doing this with just one device would make a difference. Given what you noticed, I suspect a VLAN should bring a bigger improvement. We shall see.
I wish I could set it up in a way that allows me to easily toggle it on/off, but unlikely as the K50 would have to grab new IP addresses.
Yesterday I posted that I believed I had successfully created an isolated audio VLAN. I deleted the post because I found that checking the isolate option doesn’t actually isolate the VLAN from the default network. Grrr.
I believe I succeeded today by also adding firewall rules that drops “LAN in” traffic from each segment to the other. I’m certain now that it’s isolated. I have been trying to punch open a hole that at least allows my NAS to be accessed from the audio VLAN. So effing frustrating as nothing seems to work as it should - but clearly the fault is with my understanding. Definitely not something that novices should think of taking on.
Tonight I will do some listening comparisons to see if it’s worth the hassle. It looks like I should be able to A/B isolation by toggling on/off the rules.
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Respect for putting so much energy into the project.
I have a Unifi router and switch (managed) myself, but I still have no idea how to approach it all.
And I want to do that without irritating my housemates.
I’m really curious to hear about your experience.
I’m certainly no Ethernet expert, but from what I understood is create a subnet you can isolate the audio network completely from the home network. Where in Vlan the Antipodes still ‘sees’ the additional data traffic from your tv, iPads etc… Hence I would aim for a real subnet. This means your controller has to be on the same subnet…
On Friday, I had posted to this thread that I believed I had successfully created an isolated audio VLAN. I deleted that post because I found that checking the isolate option in the Unifi GUI didn’t actually isolate the VLAN from the default network. Grrr.
Yesterday though I succeeded in creating an isolated audio VLAN by also adding a firewall rule that drops “LAN in” traffic from each segment to the other.
To compare the sound quality with and without isolation, all I needed to do was pause the firewall rule I created. Pausing/resuming the rule took about a minute to get applied. So I would listen for a bit with the rule in place, then pause it and listen for a bit with no isolation.
It wasn’t difficult to notice the improvements when the firewall rule was enabled (and the audio segment isolated). I would still have to say though that the improvements were subtle but they were welcome nonetheless. I was reminded of my SFP shootouts a number of years ago. When I paused the rule (and removed the isolation), I was still left impressed with how great my reference tracks sounded. Re-enabling the rule made things just a little better as it took an edge off, made things a bit more coherent, and slightly improved dimensionality. Most importantly though it made things a bit darker, but in a good way. That made what I was hearing a bit more believable.
I suspect that placing the K50 on its own VLAN likely reduced a bit of traffic even without adding the firewall rule that blocked all traffic. That could explain why I only perceived a subtle improvement from blocking all traffic. Not easy though to compare the differences with the K50 back on the main network vs assigned to the VLAN, as I found I had to reboot the K50 to move it to a different subnet.
The other thing I learned was that Unifi introduced new functionality not too long ago that makes it easier to apply firewall rules. The new feature is called a zone-based firewall, but unfortunately this isn’t available to me as I have an older cloud gateway. I plan on upgrading in the not too distant future.
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