Roon topology question

If your stats are that good, it will be fine. I have over half of my zones running on WiFi and it’s very stable. My network layout is not ideal–I have a 1st-gen (~2013) 802.11ac router sitting at the far end of a sprawled out house. I should really upgrade to a mesh WiFi solution…but I’m still able to push 192kHz streams to the far end of my house reliably.

Some more general thoughts about WiFi, not necessarily pointed directly at you, but maybe you’ll find it interesting too.

The places where people get into trouble with WiFi are:

  • Line of sight issues causing periods of time where packets cannot flow. This can happen when you get stone or brick in the way of the signal. You would know that this was happening because you’d see periods where ping times went up into the hundreds of milliseconds or more. I can take my perfect WiFi network and move the router over a couple of feet so it’s situated behind the chimney, and suddenly all WiFi stuff on the far end of the house starts acting up.

  • Dense urban environments where there is a lot of WiFi interference. Solutions include using 5GHz connections as much as possible or upgrading to a mesh network (Orbi, Eero, Google Home, …) instead of a single router to decrease the distance between devices and the thing they are talking to.

  • Poor quality or underpowered routers. The Apple AirPort Extreme is extremely bad (they seem to be exiting that business and paying little attention to the issues…I wouldn’t want one in my life). Some “cable company specials” are not great either. This technology moves over time–a first-generation 802.11n router will underperform compared to something more current, simply because the newer ones have more CPU/RAM. If at all possible, make sure your router does 802.11ac. Even if your endpoints are n-only, the bandwidth hungry phones/tablets/laptops are more likely to have ac support, which will get them out of the way a little bit.

  • Poorly configured additional access points. If you need this kind of stuff to cover your home, you will be much, much happier with a mesh network. Often handoffs between repeaters cause problems. It is also very easy to misconfigure them such that the devices end up re-associating when they hop in a way that disrupts connections, or end up accidentally living on segmented networks. We’ve had several seriously puzzling support cases that ended with the user simply unplugging everything but the main router, and finding that not just Roon, but everything started working better.

  • WiFi “range extenders” or “repeaters”. These have too many tradeoffs to be considered an actual improvement. These never worked well because they were too “dumb”. Mesh technology (where all of the base stations are coordinating with each other out of band of the WiFi signal) work much, much better.

In short: the absolute best option for home WiFi is a mesh network–multiple base stations from the same manufacturer working in concert. The second best is a single 802.11ac router with a good reputation. Things will probably still work even if your situation is worse than that so long as you avoid the above pitfalls.

8 Likes