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.
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.
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. |
@cleeds - The thing about the Roon Core (i.e. server) is it does not send multiple formats downstream. It's always PCM, uncompressed. It may receive MP3, FLAC or ALAC, but what it sends to the endpoints is not. This means any decompression, upsampling, DSP etc. must happen in the core. |
A standard CD playing stereo at 16 bits and 44.kHz outputs 1.4 Million bits per second. An uncompressed stream with twice the bits and four times the frequency requires 8 times the bandwidth, or over 11 Million bits per second. That is the raw data bit rate - there are substantial overheads for packet switched networks like the internet and Ethernet because the packets are encapsulated in headers and footers. Even more overheads are incurred if much error correction is required. Something is not adding up! Are you sure you are not reporting bytes per second, which is 8 times more than bits per second? And on your numbers a Gigabit connection might at face value support 700 streams, not 70?
|
