Routers, switches, network cables, fanless PC's

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Lindsayt
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Routers, switches, network cables, fanless PC's

Unread post by Lindsayt »

If someone were to ask me the following, my answer would be as per the following post: :ugeek:
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I am finally getting round to implementing streaming in to my system and that involves upgrading my DAC and buying a dedicated streamer. My initial thought was to base my streamer on a fanless PC loaded with Volumio connected via USB however after reading far too much "stuff" on the net I will probably go with one or another RPi based device using IS2 or AES/EBU connectivity.

Irrespective of what I chose as a streamer its impossible to ignore everything is coming in to the room via a bog standard Talk Talk hub (its a stable fibre service) and my gut feel is this an obvious area of weakness in the digital chain.

I know this is area where you have a lot of experience and I would be very grateful of your input.

Lets start with the cable out of the wall socket, its going to be 0.5m long. What's the best class or category, I know in simplistic terms the higher the CAT number the faster its throughput but I think I read somewhere CAT 6 or 6a is as high as you can go ?

Replacing the Talk Talk hub with a second hand switch is where I hope to make the biggest improvement but I don't know how easy that is to do. I assume my Talk Talk hub has some form of dedicated Talk Talk software on it and if so how easy would it be load that on to the switch?

In an ideal world the switch will be small & discrete as the room is small and minimalistic so the typical rack mount switch would be impossible to hide away. Your thoughts on what brand/model switch to search for would be great.

Finally the cable out of the switch ( probably 1m) into my streamer, am I correct in thinking it needs to be the same class/category as the one connecting the wall socket the switch ?
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antonio66 (Sat Aug 21, 2021 12:04 am)

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Re: Routers, switches, network cables, fanless PC's

Unread post by Lindsayt »

A fanless desktop Windows or Linux PC can be put together for about £400, if you want something with ultra fast boot times and application loading times.

In terms of network speed from slowest to highest in cables, with max distance being used as a tie breaker:

Cat5<Cat5e<Cat6<Cat6A<Cat7<single mode fibre<Cat8<multimode fibre(OM4 & OM5)

The max speed of OM4 & OM5 is 100 gigabits per second. That's faster than any hard drive. Which makes that speed pointless in a home, but maybe useful in a Data Centre where you have a cluster of servers talking to each other or sharing a back-bone.

Cat 8 cables can be bought new from Farnells for about £20 for a 5 metre length (I've not checked prices recently. Of the copper based cables, Cat 8 is engineered to the highest data transmission standards.

It's a bit unusual for homes to have wall sockets. A modern home may have these. Offices generally have loads of these. Most old homes don't. The sockets on a hub or switch are called "ports" and not wall sockets.

If you do have wall sockets, you may want to have a look at what standard of cabling has been used in the building. If it has been wired with Cat5e, from an IT point of view it's pointless having Cat6 or better patch cables (the cables that run from the wall socket to the device). For sure you can mix copper based cables and it will all work (as long as max distance limits aren't exceeded) but the speed will be limited by the slowest cable in the chain from the switch or router port to the device.

A Talk Talk hub is a combined router plus 4 port switch plus central AP (wireless Access Point).
The routing functionality is key here. It's this that provides your link to the Internet via the connection that comes into your home. You cannot replace your hub with a switch.

You could replace the hub with a suitable Cisco or HP Procurve router. One that would accept the connection that comes into your home. Generally these are routers designed for branch offices. But the downside of this would be configuring the router to work with your ISP's (Internet Service Provider's) connection. I'm confident that this could be done without a huge amount of difficulty by a network engineer. Someone new to routers would have to undergo a crash course to configure it.

What's more common, and what I've done in my home is to add 1 or more industrial strength switches in addition to the hub provided by the ISP. So that you have:

Connection to the outside world-> hub -> switch -> multiple PC's, printers, other switches, AP's

In my opinion, the best engineered industrial switches are Cisco and HP Procurve. For a living room, a fanless switch is desirable. If you want something small, go for an 8 port switch.

Fanned switches are fine if you have a data cabinet in your basement or utility room.

There are 2 main speeds that you get with used Cisco and Procurve switches: 100mb/s and 1000mb/s (also called 1gb/s or simply gigabit switches).

NIC's (network interface cards) in PC's and laptop generally have a 1 gb/s max speed, and Talk Talk hub should have the same internal network speed (and usually a lot slower, about 70mb/s in a lot of parts of the UK for the internet connection speed).

If you're happy to spunk up £60 for a switch, go for a gigabit switch.
If £20 is a more comfortable level, a 100mb/s switch will work fine - and most people wouldn't notice the difference if you didn't tell them.

With a bit more time I could look out for what deals are on ebay at the moment...

One thing you might want to think about, is going for fibre optics within your internal home network. The advertising blurb for £2000 audiophile switches says that they filter out unwanted electrical noise. With fibre optics there is zero electrical noise going through the cable.
If you go for a fanless PC, it should be relatively easy and cheap to fit a fibre compatible NIC.

Cisco and HP Procurve switches will work fresh out of the box in terms of them passing on network traffic. In a business environment they are always configured. I love switches that come with a CLI (command line interface - a text based interface) because they are so quick to configure. You just paste in a text file. Most of the configuration is for business type features, such as a bod in Glasgow managing and working on a switch in Southampton. But some configuration is useful for minimising connection delays when PC's are powered on.

In my home network I've got my children's connections configured at a 10mbps speed and my PC at 1000mbps. :roll:
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slinger (Fri Aug 20, 2021 10:13 pm) • antonio66 (Sat Aug 21, 2021 12:04 am)

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Re: Routers, switches, network cables, fanless PC's

Unread post by TheMarlin »

Lindsayt wrote: Fri Aug 20, 2021 8:04 pm Typing my answer now...
Oops. Wrong thread. Apologies.
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Re: Routers, switches, network cables, fanless PC's

Unread post by antonio66 »

Interesting thread, strangely enough, only yesterday purchased a CAT 6 cable to connect from my router/connection box to my laptop, this was to help with video streaming as it can be a bit hit and miss. I did not know whether it was just poor internet or wifi, well the experiment was partially successful, so $4 well spent.
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Lindsayt (Sat Aug 21, 2021 7:47 am)

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Re: Routers, switches, network cables, fanless PC's

Unread post by Lindsayt »

One thing worth mentioning is that there may well be quite a lot of fake cat 5e cables about.
Proper cat 5e should have solid copper conducting cores. Fake Cat 5 e is CCA (copper clad aluminium).
The fake stuff looks, feels, smells, tastes the same. Over short enough distances (the max guranteed distance for genuine cat 5e is 100 metres) it will probably transmit the signals well enough. It might sound different through yout hi-fi. And it definitely burns differently, with aluminium having a lower melting / burning / shriveling temperature - strip off the cladding and put it over a gas hob and compare it to genuine cat 5e.

I have seen no evidence, but it's fully possible that there are fake cat 6, 7 and 8 cables.

This is something where I don't want to scare monger, but it is something to be aware of.

Something else worth mentioning is that it is easy to make your own copper based patch cables of any category from 5 to 8. With 8 being as easy as any of them, although it's the priciest due to the cost of the RJ45 connectors that go on the ends of the cables.
All you need is a reel or length of the cable, the RJ45 connectors suitable to your category of cable, a cutting / crimping tool (some tools are better than others) and instructions via google.

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Re: Routers, switches, network cables, fanless PC's

Unread post by Daniel Quinn »

As far I am aware cat 5 can be CCA. It may not be as good ( I've no idea , but CCA is used in some well known interconnects)

It is however incorrect to call it fake

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Re: Routers, switches, network cables, fanless PC's

Unread post by Lindsayt »

Daniel Quinn wrote: Sat Aug 21, 2021 8:46 am As far I am aware cat 5 can be CCA. It may not be as good ( I've no idea , but CCA is used in some well known interconnects)

It is however incorrect to call it fake
It is 100% correct to call CCA based Cat 5e cable fake.
The standards require full copper. No ifs, no buts, no arguments.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojFPdg7DGvk

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Re: Routers, switches, network cables, fanless PC's

Unread post by NSNO2021 »

What a wonderful coincidence as I was about to ask a remarkably similar question as the original post, cheers Lindsay ;-)

There's a fair bit to absorb but one of my first thoughts was, given your networking savvy why have you kept your service provider hub and then added a switch to that. In my simplistic "less is more" world exchanging the service provider hub for a Cisco or HP router feels like a cleaner, better choice but that's said out of ignorance of the realities of doing anything like this.

What advantage does adding the switch to to the SP hub give you or me ? Thanks Paul
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Re: Routers, switches, network cables, fanless PC's

Unread post by Lindsayt »

In my case I don't use my network for transmitting music signals. I'm old school analogue and CD's.
I added switches and AP's to my home network to increase the number of available wired connections and to increase wireless coverage to an area that previously had no signal.

If I were streaming music over my network I would try a used branch office gigabit Cisco router.

One thing to bear in mind is that in the event of the Internet connection not working, one of the first questions that the 1st line support ask from their script is "What router are you using?" expecting you to reply with the router that they supplied.

Various users on the Internet have reported sound quality improvements when they've added industrial switches or audiophile switches to their home network - that sit between the ISP supplied router and their streaming device.
For users that have NAS (Network Attached Storage) that holds their music files, the network signal could be arranged to go through their switch and never touch the router en route to the streaming device.

It's one of those things that I'd say is worth trying if you can do it without spending a load of money that you'll never get back.
A £20 to £60 used switch is no big deal in the context of what many people spend on their audio systems.

There's no guarantees that you'll get any better sound quality with a used Cisco or HP Procurve switch, plus fancy cabling. And it may be system / network / listener dependent as to whether any money spent in this area is worthwhile.
But enough people have reported sonic improvements for it to be worth trying with an open mind.

When it comes to audiophile switches, there's what I call a lot of snake oil and bullshit. The claims that audiophile £600+ switches reduce unwanted electrical noise make no sense, when for under £300ish you can go for an entirely or nearly entirely high speed fibre home network or for under £100 you can go for gigabit speed fibre connections to your key devices, eg fanless streaming PC.
If an audiophile copper based switch sounds better than fibre (which is possible, but I think is largely untested) then it will be for other reasons apart from electrical noise.

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Re: Routers, switches, network cables, fanless PC's

Unread post by CN211276 »

I found that one Cisco switch slightly improved SQ but the addition of a second one brought about a far greater improvement. Audiophile switches, such as the Innuous one surrounded by smoke and mirrors, are a rip off.

I discovered that my NAS was not dependent upon the router when we had an Internet outage for a weekend a couple of months ago. I could still play my ripped CDs. On the whole I prefer Qobuz streams to my ripped CDs. I believe this is due to superior mastering.
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