Hi all. I have just joined the forum and it’s great to see the strong community spirit, generous knowledge sharing and all round civility & respect you have for each other.
I’m exploring how to improve my home network configuration and keen to understand how K50 & Oladra owners have set theirs up. My current baseline configuration is:
• Fibre to the home ONT>ISP supplied/branded modem>Tp-link Deco X20 Mesh Wi-Fi 6 unit (ethernet out)>Netgear GS108 network switch>K50.
• All my ethernet cable are mass market ones: cat 6a shielded.
As initial “good hygiene” steps, I have:
a) Separated the mains line feeds for a) home network components and b) 2 channel set audio up.
b) added a PS audio dectet AC power conditioner for the networking devices
c) disabled the wifi functionality on the ISP modem limiting wifi to just the mesh wifi set up;
d) replaced all OEM switch mode power supplies (SMPS) with 12V ifi ipower v2 & X models (lots of debate abound about SMPS vs linear power supply (LPS) and quality/expense of each relative to SQ gains).
While cumulatively the above have yielded solid but modest improvements, it’s good to have some basic hygiene sorted as a platform/good baseline against which to test the outcomes of further exploration.
I have already done a fair few other experiments (with power supplies, fibre media converters, Net network switches……etc) and plan a few more. So if this new topic helps facilitate further knowledge sharing of value and if this thread takes off, I will share results.
Distilling my lines of enquiry to the fundamental questions I’m trying to answer:
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To what extent are music servers impervious to the quality of network inputs/connections (ie diminishing/obviating the need for heroic/costly upstream network optimisations)?
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Can an ethernet/fibre combination ever better an all ethernet set up using (in both scenarios) high quality audio grade network components?
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High quality audio grade power supplies: which is better suited to networking devices/applications: SMPS or LPS?
Apologies for the initial long winded post and thanks for taking the time to read it.