Minimum Broadband Speed Necessary For Uninterrupted Qobuz and/or Tidal Listening?

It’s not your router or anything inside your house, it’s the copper network. Copper is shared with all your neighbors and that’s why your speed varies. Also with copper, your download speeds are 10x faster than your upload speed. Also copper is noisy. Get fiber if you can, you will get a clean, stable, and no dropouts. With 1G fiber, I get 980Mb up and down, if you get 100M fiber, you would get almost 100Mb up and down. Fiber is also cheap, I pay less than $50 a month for 1Gb fiber

One more thought.  Are you both using the same 2 GHZ wifi channel, assuming you are operating on WiFi?   If so, could one of you move to a 5 GHz channel to gain some frequency diversity and the higher bandwidth at 5 GHz?

Agreed on a few points if you're streaming movies and music at the same time your speed is a bit too low. And also the channel 5G is often much less crowded than 2.4G its worth checking out.

gdnrbob, jrh1970, and jond,

Thank you for your feedback. - I appreciate you taking the time to respond.

To answer your questions:

(1) I’m using only a hard-wired connection from my CenturyLink modem/router combo to my Bluesound Node 2i. The output of the Bluesound is hard-wired to an input on my preamp. So the Qobuz signal comes in on my DSL line and is sent via a wired connection from my modem/router to the Bluesound which in turn sends the Qobuz signal via a wired connection to my preamp. At no point in this process is the Qobuz signal sent wirelessly, it’s only handled via wired connections.

(2) I only use 5Gb channels when possible on my wireless router. I’m in a rural area and my closest neighbor is over 1/2 miles away. No networks other than my own show up on a network scan. My wireless network hosts 2 iPads (always on). 2 iPhones (always on) 1 PC (used about 2 hours.week), 1 Amazon Fire Tablet (always on, used to control Qobuz and Tidal), 1 Nest thermostat (always on), 1 Ring doorbell (always on, hard-wired for power), 1 Apple TV (always on), and 3 Echo Dot’s (airways on).

(3) The maximum number of wireless devices not at rest and in actual use at any given moment by either myself and/or my wife would be 2 iPads, 2 iPhones, 1 Amazon Fire tablet, and the Apple TV. The Nest, the Ring, and the three Dot’s are almost always in a dormant state.

tomcy6’s response to my question was also very helpful when he noted “I stream Qobuz with a download rate of 50 Mbps and have a dropout once in a while.” This suggests that I need more speed, particularly if the wireless devices in use in our home are having a negative impact on my music streaming even when they are in a dormant state.

I suspect when a manufacturer conducts Alpha and Beta testing of their internet devices that they likely test them in a lab environment devoid of any other internet connectivity. This would permit them to say my device will work properly at an xxMb broadband speed. And I would suggest when you begin adding additional devices to a network carrying a Qobuz signal, the impact of these devices, even when dormant, requires a faster Qobuz signal so it will have no dropouts.

No manufacturer of a device that connects to the Internet can foresee if the environment in which their internet device is to be used is going to be a congested network environment or a non-congested environment.

Ergo, it’s in their corporate interests to specify a usable connectivity speed devoid of any network devices competing for bandwidth on the tested devices’ s network.

So that means we consumers of devices that are used on the Internet in our home have to look at the IoT for all network devices in our home network and purchase sufficient bandwidth so everything operates smoothly and without hiccups. So, as we add more IoT devices to our home network we have to purchase more bandwidth to accommodate these additional devices. And I guess we have to do this by trial and error.

So I must conclude there is no easy answer to my original question.

I will state again, learn how to set up your router to prioritize your music streaming connection.


Streamers buffer, that means they can accept short periods without connectivity.  Give priority to the most important data streams and drop outs become far less frequent.  I always have to do this as I have multiple computers with cloud storage and a few people in the house at times. You are often limited to the number of active connections at one time (active traffic paths) which can cause latency issues.


https://www.centurylink.com/home/help/internet/modems-and-routers/advanced-setup/qos.html