Mesh network versus a simple Wi-Fi extender

Streamers only need a trickle of bandwidth. My streamers are on extenders and while I can’t get my page to refresh on my iPad in unusual times of bad performance from my provider my streamers work flawlessly. I haven’t looked but I am sure they work fine on a couple mbs or so. While my wifi provides up to 500 mbs ocationally and 250 most of the time. It goes down to 20 - 35 a surprising amount of the time. 

High quality streamers cashe and isolate, making up for deficiencies in bandwidth, latency and such. While admittedly I have been in IT most of my life, this comes from observation of my own streamers producing simply stunning, uninterrupted sound quality from cheap repeaters. Observation to me trumps theory. I recently took a EtherRegen out of my system that performed no useful function and with two high end Ethernet cables on it degraded the sound.

With very inexpensive streamers I believe the network reliability is important. But with contemporary high quality streamers, typically it is not that important.

Lots of interesting discussions on speed. But music streaming uses very little bandwidth and good streamers buffer or cache the files… so all you need is a trickle. My streamers work flawlessly when I am have had trouble loading a web page to my iPad.

I use a wired Ethernet cable to an wifi extender. I recently switched to mesh. No difference in sound quality. On my system I get vinyl quality sound from my main streamer.