Dayton Audio WBA31 Streamer Review

[amirm]

@amirm does this look worse than the Airplay TOSLINK output dashboard measurement for this device?

Visually it did with a spray of quantization noise across the full spectrum of FFT/audible band. It was so messy that AP software could not get a reliable lock on the signal so I did not capture it.

 

[The Guy who cares]

That is the wireless broadband! Here in the UK a third of all premises have the option to be have a fibre connection into their premises (FTTP), which offers you symmetrical (up/down) Gigabit connection. I have one and I don't even think about connection anymore. It is the same feeling as having electricity. Even my Wi-Fi is faster (700Mbps) than any NAS on the SME market. What DLNA?

Streaming though WiFi isn't the best, my quess that was your problem. I always wire my internet directly to like the Apple Box and so on.

 

[sarumbear]

Streaming though WiFi isn't the best, my quess that was your problem. I always wire my internet directly to like the Apple Box and so on.

What do you mean it is not the best? Haven't you read the number? 700Mbps!

That is enough for 150 channels of 192K/24-bit audio! It is 7x faster than the 100Mbps Ethernet port of Apple TV, faster than USB 2.0 and so on...

 

[The Guy who cares]

Sorry I has wrong I skipped though your article. My bad Sorry

 

[amirm]

What do you mean it is not the best? Haven't you read the number? 700Mbps!

That's the speed to your nearest, high performance webserver. It is not the speed or performance you get continuously against a streaming service. We have 1.2 gigabit/sec link yet still get pauses on youtube and Tidal from time to time due to their end being overwhelmed. Mind you, it is 99% of the time is reliable but not as good as local streaming.

 

[sarumbear]

That's the speed to your nearest, high performance webserver. It is not the speed or performance you get continuously against a streaming service. We have 1.2 gigabit/sec link yet still get pauses on youtube and Tidal from time to time due to their end being overwhelmed. Mind you, it is 99% of the time is reliable but not as good as local streaming.

I do not use Tidal, hence cannot comment but so far I have never had a hick-up on Netflix, which routinely streams at 15Mbps and Apple Music never stuttered either. Then again the latter needs 1/3 of Netflix even on lossless Hi-res tracks.

My company has servers on a datacentre and I work from home. I copy very large (multi-gigabyte) files to-and-fro between the servers and home. I was monitoring the data rate on my computer when I first had the fibre connection out of curiosity. It was always a solid line at 700+ Mbps.

Continuous network speed is mostly affected by the contention ratio. Maybe your ISP offers a high ratio? I read a contention ratio of 50 is what is expected in the USA for residential connections. Our ISP guarantees that to be less than 10. That makes a big difference in short throttles like you mention. Or maybe your ISP's backbone is congested.

 

[The Guy who cares]

Streaming sometimes works best not using WIFI. I tried WiFi and I was so frustrated with it. I know connect internet directly and the problems disappeared.

 

[sarumbear]

Streaming sometimes works best not using WIFI. I tried WiFi and I was so frustrated with it. I know connect internet directly and the problems disappeared.

Possibly your Wi-Fi is not working well. If you are in a urban area or in an apartment block, RF congestion is expected. Switching to 5GHz channels help.

 

[The Guy who cares]

Well wifi is always a pain in the ass for like Home Theater and fixed systems such as a Laptop or Desk Top. If possible always "Hardwire" the system.

 

[DWPress]

What do you mean it is not the best? Haven't you read the number? 700Mbps!

As I quietly weep, happy to have a 3mps solution... Perfectly adequate to stream lossless via Tidal from a computer on wifi BTW.

 

[The Guy who cares]

Wifi isn't good at all. Have you tried the Amazon 4K Fire Stick? It only works on WiFi. I have the Fire Stick working perfectly after way to many moving it around my room. However my Apple TV Box at twice the cost and a horrible remote worked better because it had a direct internet connection. Wifi is best used for visitors to your home.

 

[amirm]

I do not use Tidal, hence cannot comment but so far I have never had a hick-up on Netflix, which routinely streams at 15Mbps and Apple Music never stuttered either.

Netflix like other video services using MBR (multi-bitrate encoding) to avoid having to pause and rebuffer. It will dynamically change the stream quality and even resolution in order to keep streaming. I often see this mechanism in effect on variety of video services. BTW, the start up that I was part of which we sold to Microsoft, invented MBR back in 1990s!

 

[The Guy who cares]

Here is my cool experiment. I have Panasonic-dp-ub9000 for like 3 years. One day I wanted to know how it's 7.1 Surround Decoder sounded over my Yamaha Aventage Receiver. So I connected it. What did I find? Well excellence. The built in AKM Chip out did my Yamaha. Like sound effects were realistic, no bass or high Frequency roll offs. That unit sounded better than my Yamaha Aventage Receiver. Bass was deep, Midrange was super clear and so on. So anyone who has the....try it out

 

[rarewolf]

Roon remote protocol is by far the best streaming protocol. It is designed from ground up to do this as opposed to nightmare, political design committee of DLNA for example. Combine that with certification and it brings very high reliability as well. So excuse me as I hold back my recommendation as to encourage the industry to support it. The only alternative to it is Airplay with its 16 bit limitation.

I’d have to understand specifically why it is you believe Roon’s is the best protocol. From my own perspective, if it streams bitperfect gapless 192kHz PCM over wifi, using an app that provides instantaneous loading of huge libraries and immediate selection and searching, then it’s doing its job. JRiver’s media server provides the DLNA connection and makes it available for the WiiM. Admittedly, the WiiM player is slow, but the WiiM also makes itself available as an audio output device for other apps, for both Android and iOS… for example, the JRiver remote client.

Admittedly, I thought the Roon worked the same way, as do some other wares. So, I’m not sure how Roon could be more efficient(?)

 

[The Guy who cares]

I’d have to understand specifically why it is you believe Roon’s is the best protocol. From my own perspective, if it streams bitperfect gapless 192kHz PCM over wifi, using an app that provides instantaneous loading of huge libraries and immediate selection and searching, then it’s doing its job. JRiver’s media server provides the DLNA connection and makes it available for the WiiM. Admittedly, the WiiM player is slow, but the WiiM also makes itself available as an audio output device for other apps, for both Android and iOS… for example, the JRiver remote client.

Admittedly, I thought the Roon worked the same way, as do some other wares. So, I’m not sure how Roon could be more efficient(?)

Here is what I suggest go to your local Thrift Stores and you can buy used cds for around $2. The cds sound better than streaming too. Over the past year I bought over 100 cds this way from various Thrift Stores. I also bought almost 300 Bluray Movies for $4 each. Try Thrift Stores. Cds sound better. The other advantage is you can get cds and movies that are no longer available.

 

[rarewolf]

Here is what I suggest go to your local Thrift Stores and you can buy used cds for around $2. The cds sound better than streaming too. Over the past year I bought over 100 cds this way from various Thrift Stores. I also bought almost 300 Bluray Movies for $4 each. Try Thrift Stores. Cds sound better. The other advantage is you can get cds and movies that are no longer available.

Your response makes me wonder what you believe I am listening to(?)

 

[The Guy who cares]

Your response makes me wonder what you believe I am listening to(?)

I found some excellent music at the Thrift Stores such as David Bowies "Let Dance and "Simon & Garfunkels- Greatest Hits.

 

[JohnBooty]

Keep forgetting the limits of rural USA. It’s not easy to comprehend that broadband penetration in the USA is still at 24% while in the U.K. and most of Europe it’s reaching 90%.

All the numbers I've seen point to over 90% of homes having fast broadband in the US. Couldn't find one definitive source but they all seem to agree within a percentage point or two.

That 24% figure must be broadband penetration by geographical area. We have a looooot of unpopulated space. Big deserts, plains, swamps, remote frozen tundra and forest in Alaska, etc. We do not run broadband out to those places. We've got 11 individual states bigger than the UK. Some of them have hardly anybody living in them. Alaska alone is like 6x the size of the UK and only 700K people live there.

 

[JohnBooty]

A modern good BT headphone streamed by a decent current mobile phone can often give a much higher quality reproduction than most typical living room loudspeaker stereo systems despite the "bad bluetooth and Spotify mp3"

Right, but our brains are not SINAD recognition engines.

We clearly know that some forms of distortion are less relevant than others, some may be subjectively preferred, etc. So it's not even remotely hypocritical to enjoy vinyl and dislike Bluetooth, or vice versa, simply because they "both have distortion."

Bluetooth almost never sounds good to me; the compression artifacts stand out like crazy. However, this is admittedly probably mostly resolved if your source material is all lossless and you use AAC or LDAC... that way it goes through only a single lossy step rather than two.

 

[thewas]

Right, but our brains are not SINAD recognition engines.

We clearly know that some forms of distortion are less relevant than others, some may be subjectively preferred, etc. So it's not even remotely hypocritical to enjoy vinyl and dislike Bluetooth, or vice versa, simply because they "both have distortion."

Of course, here though some people just look at some measurements and think the distortions will be automatically audible just because they are higher than on some better measuring devices.

However, this is admittedly probably mostly resolved if your source material is all lossless and you use AAC or LDAC... that way it goes through only a single lossy step rather than two.

With a good compressed audio file that isn't a problem either, two high quality lossy compressions are usually not an audible problem.