1. Home
  2. digital
  3. 196393-20253

You have too much network bandwidth!!

As I was fiddling around with my Roon streamer, putting the finishing touches on the network configuration I started monitoring the network throughput of the end point. With a stereo 196 kHz/32 bit audio signal it uses about 1.5 Mbits/second of bandwidth.  

This means a typical 1 GigE could support about 70 simultaneous high resolution audio streams.  Even an old-school 100 Mbit network could handle 9 of them. 

My point really is just that chances are good your home network already has much more bandwidth than you need for high resolution audio. 

erik_squires
erik_squires OP
17,553 posts
 

Couple of other things to note, for the Roon fans, the audio signal appears to be sent with no compression, allowing the end point to focus on streaming without any possible issues caused by decompressing audio data.  Also, without much DSP processing going on the CPU demand on the Roon server, an AMD 5600G is around 3% and the Pi 5 2% (measured as in percent of a core).  So overall very very little CPU time is involved and little network. 

gkelly's avatar
gkelly
1,051 posts
 

I use the very least expensive option when it comes to the Internet. Do not have any issues with playback from audio and video streams. 

cleeds
6,593 posts
 

I’m not sure it’s possible to have too much network bandwidth, but it’s true that you don’t need much for audio.

erik_squires

With a stereo 196 kHz/32 bit audio signal it uses about 1.5 Mbits/second of bandwidth. 

Of course that depends to an extent on the amount of compression applied to the FLAC file. But, again, you don’t need much. Qobuz recommends "a connection speed higher than 10 Mbps" and that probably is intended to leave bandwidth for simultaneous use by other apps. 

More to discover