Logitech Transporter FYI

All SB devices operate in the 2.4Ghz (IEEE 802.11g) band which, in many locations, is heavily polluted. Best case with 802.11g, you’ll see about 22 Mbit/s average throughput, but interference from other sources can cause constant resending of packets to replace corrupted or lost data, substantially reducing this data rate to your SB device, maybe as much as half or more. Additionally, increasing distance between antennas reduces the throughput, too. I'm not discounting your results as well as others with the same results, but my results were different. Most likely because I have few neighbors and I set my wireless router up on a channel that no one else in range was using. If you run DD-WRT on your wireless router, among its other unique features, you can pick any available channel, not just the few North America channels available with the factory firmware. Anyway, in my case I had to make it work since my PC is on the other side of the house and a permanent Ethernet cable run would be darn near impossible.

Because of the distance, I conducted my test using a 100’ CAT5e patch cable borrowed from work. I wanted to run the test because I had wondered about the differences if any, myself. Yes, I returned the cable!

Also, in order to get great WLAN performance to my listening room, I didn’t just plunk in a wireless router and turn it on. I had to jump through a few hoops. I configured my WLAN using a Buffalo Air Station with the high power radio chip, loaded it with DD-WRT firmware, installed a hi-gain directional antenna on the wall, picked a clear channel, and then turned up the output power slightly through the DD-WRT firmware.

Anyway, like you, I really enjoy the Transporter and it ain’t going anywhere anytime soon! Just using the Transporter’ s analog outputs, it bet the snot out of my old Mark Levinson No. 36 DAC not matter what transport was used with it. BTW, if you haven’t already, check out http://forums.slimdevices.com/.

Well it’s good to know that others have had similar results going hard wired with the SB devices.

As far as wireless signal strength goes, the worst I ever received between the router and Transporter on any given day was 97% since my router sits only a few feet above the transporter itself. My PC that hosts the SB Server software is using a hard wired connection to one of the ports on the same wireless router. The music files sit on a GB capable NAS device that is also hardwired to the same wireless router.

Now to take this conversation down into the weeds a bit I will add some detailed info below which I logged while doing my own testing of the bandwidth usage of the wireless connection between the Transporter and my Wireless Router in my home. These numbers should be taken with a grain of salt as I was not using enterprise class hardware which typically offer SNMP trapping/logging capabilities that are much more accurate.

So I did a series of traffic analysis tests on the wireless links between the router and the transporter one day when I was in one of those nerdy moods. During the tests I used the same source file each time which, in this case, was Track 1 from Led Zeppelin's Houses of the Holy CD that was ripped with compression set to "0" into a .FLAC file using DBPowerAmp. The total size of the song is roughly 44.5mb in this format.

During the test, the highest observed chunk of data that was transmitted within the 1min intervals that I was using to capture packets was 13mb (mega bytes). When I divide this number by 60 sec it shows that roughly 221kb (kilo bytes) of data was being transmitted, per sec, during this particular 1 minute logging interval.

Now based on the Wireless G adapter that is included with the Transporter it should be capable of ingesting a max of 54Mbps (Megabits per second). This number equates to roughly 6.75mb (mega bytes) of data per sec.

So based on these numbers I was never even close to taxing the bandwidth capabilities of the wireless link, even if I take into account the fact that I was connected at less then 100% signal strength (97% in my case).

In my mind these numbers were believable enough to rule out any bandwidth related issues that would result in the loss of SQ that I was hearing.

So if I rule out bandwidth as the cause of the loss of SQ then this leads me to think it is more the result of airborne interferences such as EMI/RFI/Microwave or similar as eluded to by “Forrestc” in the post above. While I can't fully buy into the idea that changing the Wireless Channel will help bring back the lost SQ it certainly can't hurt and I will give it a try.

I guess unless their is a standard implemented for which devices can operate on which channels and at which frequency that offers complete isolation this will be a tuff problem to get around.

Interesting stuff either way ..Thanks for the responses and feel free to add any more info

When you use CAT5, do you have a balun on each end? I'm quite satisfied with this method.