Snakeoil Salesman 2 channel setup

[agent_kith]

Unifi gear looks impressive from the get go, but it's management features are pretty medicore. It has pretty fast wire speed though, better than the HP 1810 switch that was replaced.

And now I have a full stack of Cisco Meraki switch: MS 120 (switch), MR33 (wireless access point), MX64 (router).

Not entirely sure how to add these gear to the existing network infrastructure, will have to give it some thought. The Meraki has pretty good management features, will it be better than the Unifi in terms of sound quality? Time will tell.

[agent_kith]

Not entirely sure how to add these gear to the existing network infrastructure, will have to give it some thought. The Meraki has pretty good management features, will it be better than the Unifi in terms of sound quality? Time will tell.

So many got'chas with this Cisco Meraki. The middle box (MX67) is the router. Problems with this router:

1. Does not support IPv6
   
2. Does not do analytics properly if I have a Layer 3 router behind this.
   

So this means the MX67 only works if the network behind it is layer 2 only. In other words, I need to setup this to do my inter-VLAN routing. Easy? Nope. Because I can only configure this equipment form the Internet, if I make a mistake, it'll cut my internet connectivity. And the whole network goes down.

Spent the past 2 evenings trying to get all this Meraki gear to work with my existing Unfi stuffs. Unfortuantely no time for any Snakeoil development. No idea if this will improve the sound quality, but it will with development because, this Cisco gear supports proper QoS (almost, can't specify by ports), and it'll allow me to capture the packets directly without mirroring the contents to another port.

Speaking of which, I wonder if I should add a feature into Snakeoil for people to sniff what their Snakeoil PC is doing. In theory it should help people further tweak their system. If something is worth doing, that something is defintiely worth overdoing.

[agent_kith]

Past week been struggling with getting the network up and running. For some reason my Wifi clients just cannot connect to my Snakeoil PC. Little did I know the Meraki WAP has a firewall built in (L3 and L7). This feature alone plus the extra antenna really leave the Ubiquiti Unifi line for dead.
 

The music player port is now off this Meraki switch (Port 8). This switch is connected via fibre to the original 48 port Unifi. Why this switch though?
 

Reason is this - Analytics and diagnostics!
 

The most important stuff would be that "Packet capture" feature. This allows me to grab data directly off from the switch. Something that I couldn't do before. When I try to capture data packets from the Snakeoil PC, I have to SSH in, and capture from there. It's not as good as the captured traffic will include the SSH session.

And all these months of re-organisation is worth it (In theory at least). The data capture has shown the traffic to and from the Snakeoil player is down to the bare minimum. The network traffic can be lowered still, but I choose to keep CDP and LLDP broadcasts running on the network. These two are network discovery protocols which helps me find where things are on the network. UDLD and ARP are essential to networking so they have to operate. This Snakeoil PC and the NAS are the only two devices on this VLAN. So traffic is really really quiet.

Before this change, I have up to 60 devices all chattering on the same network. It was noisy as... Not any more. :)

Things are not perfect yet - the wrong switch is being used as the IGMP querier, can't seem to enable SRTP between the Unifi and the Meraki. But despite these, I'm on a good start. This setup will have to do for now, from tomorrow it's time to get back to Snakeoil development.

[Snoopy8]

Not sure whether you have tested this, but try using a linear power supply with the switch.

[agent_kith]

Not sure whether you have tested this, but try using a linear power supply with the switch.

I did use a LPSU before when using HP ProCurves, and that indeed is an improvement.

These meraki and Unifi devices unfortunately can't be LPSU'ed very easily - odd voltage and wattage requirements. My biggest gripe yet is although the SMPS is 3 pin, the DC isn't earthed. And there's really nothing I can do to ground it easily. Still looking at options, one maybe is to to get a long fiber cable and connect it all the way back to the PC. But I really hate to go up the roof.

For now, the SQ is as before compared to the HP (maybe even better). Even though it's running on SMPS.

Imagine what could happen if I can find a LPSU for it..

[agent_kith]

BTW, before anyone goes out and buy a Layer 2 switch. Note that somewhere in your network you'll need a layer 3 device (router) to do the inter-VLAN routing. e.g. if you only have a layer 2 switch, and with two VLANS 10 and 100. Traffic in VLAN 10 cannot talk to VLAN 100 without going through a router first.

If your Internet/ADSL router suppors VLAN, that can do the job. But most of these devices are also slow, they may have gigabit ports but they cannot transfer at that speed. So it'll kill all the benefits. Expensive routers is not necessary a fast one, e.g. the Meraki MX64 router can only route at 250 Mbps.

You'd be much better off just go with a good LPSU with a normal switch instead.

The reason why I set up my network this way? It allows me:

1. to talk to all my devices on the network, while they only can see what I want them to see
   
2. I can do very high bandwidth stuffs that will saturate a 1000 Mbps port, and yet the quality of my stereo setup remains unaffected
   
3. turn on port isolation
   
4. Sniff traffic directly on the switch
   
5. Intrusion detection and prevention by analaysing network for threats.
   

None of those are probably important to anybody else. If you want to cut down on the extra network traffic, this can be accomplished in a much simpler way:

1. Add another network card (or a network card with multiple LAN ports), connect this directly to the NAS (they usually have multiple LAN ports)
   
2. Disable DHCP server and assign static IPs everywhere
   

That'll take 5 minutes top to do.

[agent_kith]

Finally, i have my very own SACD ripper!


Time to buy heaps of SACDs when I'm back in Hong Kong. :wacky:
 

To be honest SACDs are still hit and miss. This is one of the SACD I've ripped earlieri today. This album sounds really average (if not outright bad) on my Marantz SA11-S2. No improvement at all when I ripped the tracks and played back on the Accuphase DC-37.

[Snoopy8]

Finally, i have my very own SACD ripper!


Time to buy heaps of SACDs when I'm back in Hong Kong.
 

To be honest SACDs are still hit and miss. This is one of the SACD I've ripped earlieri today. This album sounds really average (if not outright bad) on my Marantz SA11-S2. No improvement at all when I ripped the tracks and played back on the Accuphase DC-37.

Agree SACDs are hit and miss. Unfortunately, the few that I bought from HK off eBay are no better than CDs. They  boost the loudness wth no improvement in detail, resolution, sound stage etc.  

Your Marantz SACD player is very good, so I would not expect the ripped DSF files to be better. Some DACs perform better with DSFs e.g. Gieseler Fein II, others poorer e.g. Chord Qutest.  Have not heard the Accuphase.

[agent_kith]

Agree SACDs are hit and miss. Unfortunately, the few that I bought from HK off eBay are no better than CDs. They  boost the loudness wth no improvement in detail, resolution, sound stage etc.  

Yeah. That SACD is worse than a CD. I think the insert has a background info of the mastering process. Lol.

Your Marantz SACD player is very good, so I would not expect the ripped DSF files to be better. Some DACs perform better with DSFs e.g. Gieseler Fein II, others poorer e.g. Chord Qutest.  Have not heard the Accuphase. 

The Marantz is too bass heavy for my liking. The accuphase is more neutral and clearer. Turns out if it's bad on one, it's gonna be bad on the other.

The is the worst SACD I have owned so far. Sighz.. Not going to stop buying them though. HK is SACD heaven for me.

[agent_kith]

Cleaned up the server space over the long weekend. Lots of effort, doesn't look like much but it's a lot neater now compared to before.