16 months ago, I started subscribing to Roon and added an ARCAM ST60 and a NUC11TNHi7 to my network in the lounge (connected to the same 8 port 1GBe switch as my TV, BluRayHDD recorder and 4Kplayer). At the time, ethernet was distributed around my house using a high performance homeplug (2400Mbps nominal). The router and all swithes (including those in the home plug devices) were limited to 1Gbps).
Subsequently, I added three Raspberry Pis for additional audio endpoints. At that time, my network looked like:
The use of the homeplug devices worked and Roon was pretty reliable. It should be noted, however, that I was careful to ensure that the commonly used Roon Endpoints were connected to the Roon Server using wired ethernet so that, at least when streaming to those local endpoints, the Ethernet over mains was only used to stream from Qobuz or Tidal to the Roon Server.
Early this year, I experimented by replacing the HomePlug in the lounge with a long (50m) cat 6 cable. As well as improving the general network connectivity when using my laptop in the lounge, giving me full 1gbps full duplex connectivity between my laptop in the lounge and my NAS. As a side effect of this minor upgrade, I found the Roon search experience to be improved.
Consequently, my ‘experiment’ became more permenant than I originally intended. But I really did not want the cable trailing around in my house so I have embarked upon a network upgrade.
Firstly, I upgraded my Router and the the network switches that I use and then, just this last week, I have completed running CAT6 ethernet cabling (no need for CAT 6A or higher because the cable runs are all less than 20-25m and so CAT6 will support 10Gbps ethernet). My network now has no HomePlug devices in sight (
). It now looks like this:
It has to be said that this latest upgrade has made little additional advantage to Roon but, the performance accessing my NAS from the various computers around the house is now much better and when I now upgrade the network connectivity to my NAS to 10Gbps ethernet (as I intend to do shortly), I should see my NAS performance improve dramatically again.