No big surprise here, but just posting for future reference by others…
I have a Panamax M8-AV-PRO “line conditioner and surge protector” which has RJ-45 connectors to “protect connected equipment from electrical surges that travel over telephone and network lines.”
I was getting errors from Roon while playing DSD files and/or while using Sample Rate Conversion. The file would play for about ten seconds, then stop with an error, even though processing speed was well above the 1.0 threshold.
I changed a single variable, removed the Panamax from the network chain, and I can upsample and play DSD to my heart’s delight now.
It definitely should, meaning that there’s something else than pure bandwidth issues causing the problem.
Do you mind sharing how your Roon setup and how it involves the Panamax?
But yet the fact remains that the addition of the Panamax caused the problem and the removal of it fixed it.
There must be something happening in the surge protection filter that isn’t playing nice with the audio bits. I haven’t done any before/after pings to test for packet loss (0% after).
The Panamax sits between an Airport Express and a Sonore UltraRendu.
The Goodput could be substantially less than 100Mbps though. Still, seems like DSD512 only requires ~9Mbps (don’t quote me, I’m remembering without confirmation).
Wireshark captures will help, if you’ve used it before, if not I wouldn’t bother unless you’re up for a learning curve.
Exactly. I expect this surge protector is wrecking havoc on your devices’ ability to auto-negotiate link speed, duplex, etc. These sorts of power strip features are typically an afterthought added to satisfy spec sheet marketing requirements. If you really need surge protection on your wired LAN (e.g. outdoor wireless radio), then there are products engineered specifically for this application such as Ubiquiti Network’s Ethernet Surge Protector that won’t compromise performance or reliability.
