It cost me about $300 USD to have an electrician hardwire ethernet Cat 6 from the router (office) side of the house to the living room (media center) side of the house. The cost including the labor of fishing the Cat6 cabling through the walls, the attic, materials, and installing wall jacks. No more wifi dropouts, no headaches. Installed a switch of the media center side which feeds the gear. Wifi use is limited to Roon remotes and other wifi based stuff like cameras, iphones, ipads, etc.
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Yes, that is why my whole house is wired with Ethernet.
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My house is a 1999 build. Had to retrofit, but it was well worth it.
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I found a custom built house, where the guy who built it had the foresight to run conduit from a central location to all the rooms. That way, if I want to change cabling it is easy to run.
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Makes things so much simplier being connected by wire. My wifi is great (six pod eero mesh) but that’s because I put very little traffic on the wifi.
I’ve tried to communicate that even an only semi-competent electrician is capable of this, in several posts.
To my knowledge it has always fallen on deaf ears.
Keep in mind that not everyone’s living situations allows for running ethernet throughout their homes (people who rent, for example). Also, with the advancements in mesh systems, it is not always necessary. My Orbi was the best tech investment I have ever made - my router is in my basement and I stream to the third floor without issues. In any event, the great thing about the trial period is that these sorts of issues can be surfaced.
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My guy has done other stuff for me, so I was happy to give him the work. I can do minor electical, but the firewall wire fishing looked to be a pain and I figured it was well worth it to let him complete the job. I also installed a Cat6 line into an adjacent room which was a pretty simple task.
Mesh wifi is great, but still doesn’t match the hardwired installs. Your point on some people not being able to install cable line (renting, etc) is well taken.
I always just ran wires along the wall edges, or just under the carpet when renting.
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I don’t disagree with you that wired must be better, but in my use case (which is of course all I can speak to) my C$250 mesh works flawlessly.
I am also sensitive to potential users reading these threads and concluding that they can’t use Roon because they don’t have cat 6 run throughout their home. I am sure that there are lots of people happily using Roon over wifi. I also understand that lots of the issues raised in Support here are networking issues, though.
Wouldn’t suggest it to a renter.
Judging from the thread, it doesn’t seem like the OP is a renter.
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16/44.1 no problem, but when you start pushing the hi-res files, problems happen. The are endless threads blaming the Roon program for what is usually determined to be a flaky network or underspec-ed computer equipment. If you have a solid network, Roon performs flawlessly. People need to understand the equipment needs to meet minimum specifications or issues will occur.
I tried a dual-network setup one time. I DO NOT recommend it.
I won’t labour the point here, but I have zero issues with heavy DSP or anything like that, but that is specific to my case. YMMV.
I think that OP’s question has been answered - if he can only wire one, it should be the core. I think that is something we can all agree on.
Thank you. That’s all I was wondering. I’m a renter. I’m not running cables through walls. I totally understand that in an ideal set up, both are hardwired. But in my situation with gear placement it’s going to have to be just 1 of the 2. Currently everything is on WiFi and I have no dropouts at all. But I want to make sure I’m getting the best quality I can for my situation. It seems Consensus Is that the core would be more beneficial for the Ethernet line.
Thanks everyone.
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That’s also the Roon recommendation.
Well the proof is in the pudding as the saying goes…if the wifi to the endpoint is problematic then you know what you need to do next…you can run an ethernet cable up to 100M so run it around the skirting edges and over doorways with some blueback if you have to if the wifi isn’t doing it for you.
It just does not work this way because both your computer and your end output device will not be online this way. 
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