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I'm thinking about getting a laptop and going wireless. Has anyone had experience with adding a wireless router negatively affecting the sound of their sytems? I'm not talking about when you use the computer to play music. I'm concerned about potentially adding more "hash" into the air - stuff that would affect the purity of the sound as we all know EMI, RFI, etc. do.
Thanks for any thoughts you have.
Follow Ups:
My wireless router works fine for me when I'm in the digital world...using my Sooloos music server. However when I am playing vinyl and on my phono channel of my pre-amp I can actually here the router "chatter". It's quite audible. I'm sure it's probably fixable with some additional tweaking but I have not figured it out yet.
So...when I play vinyl, I turn off the router and all is well. Easy fix.
I highly doubt that a wireless router would change the nature of the sound(more harsh, narrower sound stage, etc.), but I have heard static like clicking and beeping sounds when not playing music if I get my wireless router too close to my tube preamp or amp. Nothing even close to the noise that cell phones cause(beeeeeeep-bap-bap-bap-bap------bap-bap-bap-bap), but enough that I have to move it a few extra feet away to get rid of most of the noise.
My wife and I have six macs between us. I hate to think of the mess using ethernet wires to connect them to the outside world or even using an Ipad.
Years ago I got my first charged cables. When I heard the big improvement when the final one was added, I knew that they were a must in the modern world. Of course I am just guessing that charged cables would not have improved sound in the 1950s.
I am now in the mountains of north central New Mexico. I can see one neighbor's house but no one is there. My computer shows one very weak wireless signal, I can get only satellite tv, but I can get 3G here as of this year. I bring my charged cables with me.
I guess a big faraday cage encompassing your house would help and perhaps eliminate the need for charged cabling, if you do not to contribute to RFI and EMI into your house.
"I guess a big faraday cage encompassing your house would help and perhaps eliminate the need for charged cabling, if you do not to contribute to RFI and EMI into your house."
Norm, if the charged cables are like the ones I'm thinking of, the AQ things with a battery pack, the charged aspect will have no bearing on their shielding effectiveness. The charging business is a scheme (a clever one in my book) to reduce problems due to dielectric absorption in the cable's insulation by essentially overpowering the audio signal to the point that it's varying electric filed is unlikely to make a lasting impression on the insulation. And that's a good thing, a very good thing as dielectric absorption can produce distortion that is annoying even in tiny amounts, probably because it's rather "unnatural".
Regards, Rick
The descriptions that I've seen about dielectric absorption give a linear model (R's and C's), which would not account for any of distortion, just changes in frequency response. Where is non-linear distortion described and how large is it? How tiny are the annoying tiny amounts?
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
Electromagnetic devices with magnetic cores have saturation and hysteresis distortions. Sometimes the best way to look at it is through B=(mu)*H curves.
Steve Bench showed us that capacitors have saturation and hysteresis distortions online, perhaps best seen as D=(epsilon)*E, a very analogous formula for electrostatics.
The dielectric can saturate, too, or break before doing so with an arc-over. They are nonlinear as if magnetic materials, but in many different ways. So plastics distort differently than permalloy, for example.
DA can be seen in the hysteresis of the cap curves.
Tony, I'm not sure I remember the details very clearly. I was having problems with it in a S/H and one of the older guys in the department, now deceased unfortunately, happened to be quite knowledgeable about it and trotted out the ladder model and explained the limitations of it. One of them of course is that it has to be infinity long because some of the domains simply will stick for a very long time and may not flip back until reverse voltage is applied. The dielectric itself isn't linear. There were more but I think they were largely the result of the model using ideal caps (naturally). Real caps change size when you charge them and so they speak and listen and are affected by temperature, vib, signal rise time, on and on. There are actually mechanical changes occurring in the dielectric when the dipoles flip which store energy and help give it it's higher K. Believing that it's merely capacitance is just a convenient assumption.
I think I ended up using a polypropylene for the long ones and polystyrene for the short ones. I really like polystyrene (and they also sound very good in my opinion) but have shortcomings, typically they are just wrapped so their ESR and L aren't the lowest and worse yet they melt easily when exposed to heat or most any chlorinated hydrocarbon.
In the next version I replace the whole long S/H with a DAC, so much less grief. Just like home audio...
It would be an interesting project to try and quantify the relationship of dielectric absorption and sound in a reasonable application. I rather confident that I've heard it, but I sure haven't measured it.
Regards, Rick
In both cases the intent was to reduce RFI and EMI. Both use ac power supplies.
Thanks for the info Norm. Never heard of Exemplar Audio before.
I read the intro linked below and it was, um, interesting.
I wonder what it does and how it works, but then ostensibly so does the manufacturer so I don't feel too bad! That being the case it's tough to tell if it would have any effect on EMI. Or anything else for that matter...
Regards, Rick
a
Yes, I think so too Norm and I'm glad that they sound good in your system.
Regards, Rick
Love the smell of hash in the air! What is there to complain about?
"
When problems become increasingly difficult,we can always rely on our collective knowledge and seek relief.
Contaminate the sound? Call the CDC. they'll clean up the sound... You to!
Lots of different points of views. And a lot to think about. I suspect that I will end up not going wireless. The purity of my sound (at least as much as one can achieve that, given modern times), and my health are very high priorities.
Advantages of wireless:
1) Cheaper and easier to install.
2) Battery-operated equipment can be moved at will.
Advantages of wired:
1) Not that expensive. With modern stud and wallboard construction, it isn't hard to find installers that will put in outlets for less than $100 per drop. I put four drops in my house for about $350. If I weren't paralyzed I would have done it myself in an afternoon for $50 in parts.
2) More reliable connection with higher speed. Most wireless tops out at around 50 Mbs (assuming a good strong signal). Wired pretty much runs close to 100 Mbs all day long (some overhead is involved and reduces the transfer rate).
3) Greater network security. Wireless can be hacked. Wired requires a physical connection to the network to hack it.
4) Much lower EMI. Wi-Fi operates at the exact same frequency as a microwave oven. It's a much lower level, but it's on 24/7/365. My guess is that in ten or twenty years there will be a big "Oops!" when they discover it constitutes a health hazard.
5) Any EMI will degrade the sound of any audio system to some degree. That's why companies make power line filters, ferrites, specially shielded interconnects, termination networks for speaker cables, and in the case of Tannoy, ground connections for the speaker baskets.
Some equipment is less susceptible than others (tubes are generally better in this regard), and some people are willing to live with the degradation. But to my mind you need to have a compelling reason to use wireless to even consider it. It certainly isn't going to *improve* your sound, nor your health.
People make all kinds of excuses: "It's all around anyway, so don't worry about it." (Kind of like saying the air is already polluted, so you may as well clean the inside of your house with a gasoline powered leaf blower.) "I have a wireless router and my system sounds fine to me." (Yes, but did they ever do carefully controlled before and after tests?)
My son just got an RC helicopter with a 2.4 GHz transmitter (same as Wi-Fi and microwave ovens). It says right in the manual, "Don't put any body part within 5" of the antenna." And that is something that gets used maybe one hour per week, not 168 hours per week.
Over 30 years ago my lab instructor for organic chemistry said to avoid eating trans-fats (partially hydrogenated oils). He said that they have a shape (conformation) that is not found in nature, and that the fats get incorporated into your cell walls. Nobody knew what the effects might be back then, but it was clear that it wasn't likely to be positive.
Now they know that it increases the risk of heart disease and stroke. Frito-Lay (not known for their healthy snacks) dropped all trans-fats years ago, I'm sure to avoid the risk of lawsuits. I was glad that I took the advice of my lab instructor all those years ago. I just don't see any compelling reason to use wireless, and lots of risks and potential risks. And it's a free country, so you will do what you do.
Dropped my wireless years ago because of an earlier post by you. It did make a difference in my system. (cleaner and less harsh)
Besides that wireless never worked well in my neighborhood - too much traffic from others.
Thanks again!
Good summary Charles.
Subtle health effects can take a long time to show up so we shall see. Or perhaps more accurately, those that analyze our morbidity will see! Even more accurately will be the results for our grandchildren who are probably developing arm abnormalities if nothing else from clamping their phones to their heads...
But whatever danger may exist will very likely be dose sensitive so any danger from laptops when receiving a stream should be low. HOWEVER I admit to making a little mod to my iPAD just in case. I use it too much and always with it actually on my lap. Well, that cute little black Apple logo in the center of the back is actually a window for one of it's diversity aerials and when it's sitting on your lap guess what it's loading into! Right...
I covered mine with 3M Al. EMI tape and it blends in quite well. The other antenna is clockwise from the home button and shouldn't pose much risk.
Regards, Rick
Charlie, while i fully agree with you that wireless wifi router when powered on does degrade sound quality (this is very audible in my system), i have reasons to suspect that an active lan wire plugged into connected devices like a laptop could be augmenting some RFI before broadcasting them into the surrounding air (through integrated speakers built-in into those laptops, maybe???!?). I have found that whether I am playing back a CD through my laptop or ripping the CD into the laptop, when the lan wire is connected, the sound quality of the digital file is very much degraded in comparison.
I have noted similar problems with a connected wired phone.
I believe this could be the basis in which how the controversial "teleportation tweak" could affect the sound of one's audio system.
When I unplug my wired phone, my system sounds audibly clearer.
Hello Jerome,
I know that you are a careful listener and I don't doubt your findings. But I am far too lazy to go around unplugging all of my telephones and computer equipment before each listening session.
(I'm also sure that people who use wireless routers have a similar rationale regarding why they use them.)
Best,
Charles Hansen
Whatever happened to
....People make all kinds of excuses: "It's all around anyway, so don't worry about it."......
????
Ok, I understand about your mobility problem.
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A while ago, there was a measurement done using a tesla meter. it shows even higher RFI readings from AC wall sockets, from power supply conditioners and from cd players than from a wireless wifi router.
In another word, you got more to worry from audio components within your listening room than from wireless devices from outside of this room.
see link below:
In that earlier post, i suggested some ways to check the effect of RFI on the sound of your audio system. but surprise, surprise, many untrained listeners actually may prefer a sound that is laden with RFI introduced by nearby components!
Another issue you need to be concern about is that, when modem & router plus their switch mode power supplies were plugged into the same power supply grid, there was potential high freq noise feeding back into the grid, degrading the performance of the audio components feeding from the grid. I encounter this problem, despite having my main audio system fed from dedicated ac lines, prioritized and separated from the rest of the house.
So, the question arises, how the hell do we determine that the source of noise pollution is air-borne from wireless devices, or ac lines from noisy switching power supplies?
...into a Faraday cage? They've got wallpaper for that.
This has been discussed in the PC audio forum. There are people who believe that having a wireless router in the vicinity affects the sound of an audio system, even if none of the components of the audio system use the wireless networking. There is no question that cell phones can affect audio systems. My cell phone produced distinct sounds whenever it transmitted that came through my Nakamichi cassette player. This happened when the phone was within a foot of the player. My wireless router (normally turned off) is within a few feet of my audio system. There may be some sonic degradation when wireless is enabled, but it's not dramatic.
There are also people who believe that wireless networking has ill effects on one's health.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
I'm not using, nor do I plan on using, a computer for audio. I am only concerned with whether having a wireless router in the house will cause a degradation of audio quality in a high-end CD-only based system.
I would hazard to guess that wireless router will add to the contamination - but if you're serious about treating your system (and your house) for RFI/EMI, the effect would be negligible.
Radio frequencies are all around us; everywhere and always. That is just a fact of modern life. You can not escape RF. Adding your own RF signal to the existing miasma will make no difference.
"Radio frequencies are all around us; everywhere and always. That is just a fact of modern life. You can not escape RF. Adding your own RF signal to the existing miasma will make no difference. "
+1
Related... Often, the audible clicks and crackles that people hear through their audio systems are from electronic components cycling on and off, such as the burners on an electric stove. Continuous interference may be from the wonderful electronic ballasts on many flourescent lights (designed to help save the planet by using less electricity).
I haven't heard any negative effects since getting a wireless router - maybe because the frequencies are way up in the bazillion GHz range.
hth
I know that's true about radio frequencies. My experience so far, however, is that adding my own (microwave)to the miasma does make a difference; i.e., music is more enjoyable with it unplugged.
/
I misunderstood. I assumed you meant does the router affect the streamed files.
In my three systems I have never noticed any issue with having the router. The router is in fact right next to one system, and directly below one other, so far no issues, or degradation in sound that I can tell.
No issues whatsoever due to the presence of a wireless router here. In fact Pandora "Premium" is playing Clark Terry right now in a system right next to the router and it sounds great. Another system in a dedicated listening room well away from the router does not suffer either.
If you have neighbors, its very likely that you already have wi-fi transmissions "leaking" into your house. I use a free utility called InSSIDer to scan for wi-fi networks. Right now I can detect one other besides my own. I can't access that network, but its radio waves are present here anyway. I've detected as many as 4 "foreign" networks in other houses in which I've lived.
Right now I'm picking up 17 other networks. As far as I can tell, it doesn't affect the sound from my system, but who really knows? :)
Joe
Do you have any idea whether this leakage has affected the sound of your system? Seems if a router does affect the sound, having others leaking from "foreign" networks would make things even worse. And, in my case, adding a router in my house would make the sound worse - i.e., if leakage is already occurring from outside.
I couldn't tell you if all the wi - fi broadcasting is having an effect on my system or not. It's not like I can do an A/B test with my neighbor's access point turned off, and I'm not about to disable my own wi - fi network. I need it for work.
By the way, many microwave ovens, cordless phones, garage door openers, and baby monitors transmit on the same part of the spectrum as wi - fi. Perhaps you should consider making your listening room into a Faraday cage?
: )
Thanks Rob. I know for certain that my microwave negatively affects the sound in my house. I'll see if I can trade the baby for a new amp.
Could be the circuit it's on, noise through that rather than RF. Those microwave units that cycle power (in a way I don't know, but it's obvious they do) when not cooking at full power can be a potent AC line noise source.Edit: forgot to mention that some routers allow to adjust the transmit power. For instance, mine can be set over a range of 0 to 255, with 42 being "normal". I run at 10, reaches throughout my house but is sometimes a tad shakey in the garage...
Edits: 06/21/12
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and it should head-off any problems that might arise. You can also spray ion neutralizer into the air in your listening room for good measure.
nt
“Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead"
― Charles Bukowski
Why would I need to apply this to the laptop?
Seems that might only be the case if I was using the laptop to play files, stream music, etc. I will only be listening to music through my current CD-based system.
/
I haven't noticed any negative effect on sound from my system from having a wireless router and laptop operating in my house.
> I'm not talking about when you use the computer to play music.
> I'm concerned about potentially adding more "hash" into the air ...
You tried.
Bill
Thanks Bill. It's been a little tough to tell if others understood that I'm not doing (nor do I plan to be doing)any audio using a computer. I'm using only a CD player, and plan to continue that way. I like physically picking out and playing CDs.
> I'm using only a CD player, and plan to continue that way.
> I like physically picking out and playing CDs.I've been using a PC instead of a CD player for over 6 year but I'll forgive you.
I think rick_m's response got to the essential issue. How useful is having WiFi in your home to you?
I resisted getting WiFi for years but I find WiFi to be very worthwhile now.
Bill
Edits: 06/21/12
I haven't experienced any problems at all.
When I was trying a touch it did sound very slightly worse using it's WLAN but that was most likely internal. It didn't effect anything else.
The signal strength drops rapidly with distance so even if you have susceptible devices in your system you probably won't have problems unless the router is in close proximity to it.
If you want to try a worst case, call someone on your cellphone and sidle up to your gear and see how close you get before you hear the packets breakthrough. If you keep your router beyond that distance you should be fine since the router usually uses much less power as it isn't trying to hit a distant site. Some WLAN cards and routers allow you to adjust the output power so you can crank those down if that's available.
I really enjoy having wireless to my laptop and I bet you will too!
Rick
Hey Rick,
Here is a post that was written in 2008 by the late Al Sekela.
It could be posted as a direct reply to your post and IMHO illustrates the need to worry about RF.
Afterwards we discovered faith; it's all you need
Well, it may be a little more convoluted than I stated, but not much...
If I recall correctly Al was mostly concerned about differential powerline-conducted interference which I suspect may tend to behave as he described due to intermod in the rectifiers. But I'm talking about radiated and it usually works as I described.
Regards, Rick
I don't know if it's a result of RFI etc, but the streamed music (Flac and WAV files) sound far worse from my computer based system than do the same CD's through the same DAC. Wireless is fun to play with, and is great for background music, but not for musical enjoyment.
Thanks...I'm not talking about streaming music, though.
.
"Wireless is fun to play with, and is great for background music, but not for musical enjoyment."
One data point is is not enough to draw that conclusion. Many others are getting great results. There are WAY too many variable to rule something out just because you had substandard results with one attempt.
.
You are correct to point. This is the first attempt in my own system, and it is only one opinion.
However I personally deal with several dealers who all sell high end streaming, and hardrive based systems. The results are extremely variable, from terrible to pretty good. But a lot depends on the source files.
If you stream via WiFi, you can get dropouts and "think sounding" music - all depending upon the streaming device on the other end.
I had no end of trouble until I went hard wired with a dedicated (mac mini computer) server hard wired to a squeezebox touch. Works well after that.
"Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is knowing not to put it in a fruit salad"
Obviously, you're going to plug your cordless phone, router, and other non-audio devices into a separate power filter plugged into a different wall outlet. Of course, your audio components are plugged into another power filter going into a different wall outlet. I don't hear or sense any contamination. I have a resolving system using electrostatic speakers. It works for me!
Sorry to be so redundant but I just want to make myself clear.
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