I have most of my music encoded in Apple Lossless residing on a network drive. I would like to sit in my chair with the laptop nearby to use its player to stream wirelessly to my AV receiver. My question is how reliable (in terms of dropouts) is this arrangement likely to be for 2 channel music? My concern is that the network traffic will be increased by the need to access fairly large files on the external drive at the same time as streaming from the laptop to the Sirocco. The network is presently Wireless G. If this is likely to cause a problem, would an N network work much better?
I also have a question about the topology of the system. I assume the Sirocco completely bypasses the internal soundcard on the laptop so that its input is digital, right? (The internal card is not great). I am presently getting great results with a wired connection and external USB card, but would love to go wireless.
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Thanks
Hi thorrall, We have found
Hi thorrall,
We have found that in cases like yours, there can be problems with dropouts. Since the Sirocco requires that audio packets make it to the device in a timely matter for streaming to be smooth, heavy traffic can disrupt the quality of the stream.
If you can put the NAS drive on an Ethernet connection to your PC, this would probably solve the potential problem.
Reliability of streaming from NAS and Sirocco topology
Thanks, but if it means a wire to the computer it would seem easier (and cheaper) to just extend the USB cable to the existing sound card and use the existing wireless G to access the NAS. I suppose the other choice is to compress the music more, using a lossy format, but that would take days as my collection is substantial and I'm not sure if I would be happy with the audio quality.
Still not clear on the topology question.
Thanks
Oh yeah, sorry I missed the
Oh yeah, sorry I missed the topology question. The Sirocco is its own sound card, so the quality of your onboard soundcard is irrelevant when using the Sirocco. It shows up in your Windows Sound control panel just like any other sound card.