Wireless

iLive Archived iLive Discussions
1

Ok so I took my router which I use with my iLive to a venue I do sound in on a somewhat regular basis last night. With my iLive I get drop outs with this router somewhat frequently and have read the posts on here about different brands, 5Ghz, etc that may help this.

But here is the deal. This same router, in the same venue was used by my friend using his Behringer X32 console last night, not my iLive. The difference? No drop outs - not one.

So any theories on this? It suggests to me its not the router but something in the iLive protocol or applications.

Comments?

(this is not meant to be a pro x32 post, I’m trying to understand the difference in performance of my router)

2

I assume you are just using the router to run Editor?

Having never used the B-ringer I can’t comment on the difference between the two but assuming your friend hasn’t been using your actual router it could be the channel you are using on your router already has a lot of traffic on it. Or it could be as simple as their software does less so using a lot less bandwidth. All speculation I’m afraid

.

Just remember kids no matter how good your mixing is you can’t polish a turd…

3
quote:
Originally posted by Rexeltw

I assume you are just using the router to run Editor?

Having never used the B-ringer I can’t comment on the difference between the two but assuming your friend hasn’t been using your actual router it could be the channel you are using on your router already has a lot of traffic on it. Or it could be as simple as their software does less so using a lot less bandwidth. All speculation I’m afraid

.

Just remember kids no matter how good your mixing is you can’t polish a turd…

Yes, I am controlling my iLive with the Editor and/or mixpad - no surface.

The router configuration wasn’t changed so he was using the same channel, in the same venue in which I get the drop outs.

While it may be bandwidth, that’s a little hard for me to beleive that the iLive generates so much network traffic as to bog the router down. If it did, the router would never work but it does, and does fine for awhile but eventually will drop out.

I dunno, it is certainly all speculation but it is also interesting to see the difference in performance between the two systems. And for me, this provides evidence that it is not crowded spectrum causing the problem.

4

I can only hope that A&H responds to this thread.

I might well be that the Behringer software was written with wireless performance as one of the requirements. So, data caching, restoring from network drop-out might have been on their list while developing the software.

A&H’s network protocol and the way the editors connect seems indeed to be more error prone.

Question is whether this can easily be solved or requires some parts of the software to be rethought from the ground up?

Hope you can redo this experiment with 1.9 installed next weeks…

Wouter

IDR32, R72, Dante, Mixpad

laptop, TP-Link TL-WR1043ND</font id=“size1”></font id=“navy”>

5

And for clarity, it is the same physical router. My friend borrowed mine. It’s not separate one of the same type. It’s literally the same router.

6

It IS The 5ghz, ever since i am on it i dont have any problems anymore

mixed a band open air this summer ( 40 meters away from stage) flawless. Check the recommendation of routers on the ah wesite.

2 year old belkin here shure there are better ones by now.

cheers

dave

allways latest firm and software

iLive-144/t-80/idr-10 /idr-48/dante/pl-6/eyepad 1/belkin router/

7

I am having ipad dropouts much more frequently as of late. The thing is that when the new mix pad update came out it worked well for 6 weeks and then all of the sudden I am having trouble again with droputs. I am using the same apple airport extreme. I use both 5ghz and the normal channel. Could it be something that got changed? Is there anyway to trouble shoot it? thanks

8

If your pad updated to 1.6 ( ios) then you have to update the patch ah made as well

cheers

dave

allways latest firm and software

iLive-144/t-80/idr-10 /idr-48/dante/pl-6/eyepad 1/belkin router/

9

Hi All

R.E Comms drop outs over wifi we’ve been doing quite a lot of testing recently as were gearing up for OneMix release.

Our lost comms trigger is 10 seconds of no UDP comms between rack and Editor / MixPad.

The difference between Behringer and A&H may just be the timeout they’ve chosen, or they may not have one ! Try using the Behringer, then turn the router off, how long does it take to inform you the connection has been dropped?

The protocol they’ve chosen as well as the timeout will govern how forgiving their software is. Its a balancing act between not giving false positives, but also telling you as soon as possible if the router has been turned off.

Although I understand in this case its the same router, during our testing we’ve seen access point stutter relating to additional wireless clients going in and out of range. This varies massively by brand, and can have an impact on throughout; they’ll be more info on this shortly as its topical for OneMix users.

Cheers

Andy.

Andy

A&H

10

I never upgraded either. Same IOS as before.

11
quote:
Originally posted by mumu

It IS The 5ghz, ever since i am on it i dont have any problems anymore

</font id=“quote”></blockquote id=“quote”>

If this were the case, the Behringer console would also experience drop outs since what you are describing is a frequency congestion problem. The evidence suggests, this is not the problem since there are no dropouts using the exact same router with the Behringer console.

12
quote:
Originally posted by bucks

Hi All

R.E Comms drop outs over wifi we’ve been doing quite a lot of testing recently as were gearing up for OneMix release.

Our lost comms trigger is 10 seconds of no UDP comms between rack and Editor / MixPad.

The difference between Behringer and A&H may just be the timeout they’ve chosen, or they may not have one ! Try using the Behringer, then turn the router off, how long does it take to inform you the connection has been dropped?

The protocol they’ve chosen as well as the timeout will govern how forgiving their software is. Its a balancing act between not giving false positives, but also telling you as soon as possible if the router has been turned off.

Although I understand in this case its the same router, during our testing we’ve seen access point stutter relating to additional wireless clients going in and out of range. This varies massively by brand, and can have an impact on throughout; they’ll be more info on this shortly as its topical for OneMix users.

Cheers

Andy.

Andy

A&H

Thanks for the response. I will try that and see what happens.

Regardless, I realize there are many variables involved with WiFi performance. I just thought this to be an interesting observation with relatively low number of variables.

13
quote:
Although I understand in this case its the same router, during our testing we've seen access point stutter relating to additional wireless clients going in and out of range.

Given this, do you believe (or recommend) hiding the SSID broadcast (probably a good idea anyway but currently mine is on)? Will this reduce the amount of connection attempts by foriegn devices? Or am I not interpreting what you are saying correctly?

14

Hi Jason

I was referring to connected clients, not passive unconnected clients who are just observing SSID’s.

I was suggesting a possible cause of UDP throughput drop could have been other wireless devices connected on to the same access point, which were moving in and out of range.

Its therefore a good idea to have some form of password based encryption to stop anyone just logging on to the access point. Hiding the SSID is one way, but its not that fool proof and makes it harder to intentionally connect new wireless clients. Setting up WPA/PSK encryption would be better.

I realise this may not have been the case in your scenario, but its one of many reasons throughout can be affected.

This becomes really topical in a multi OneMix environment where you have lots of connected clients all wondering about!

Hope this helps

Cheers

Andy

A&H

15

Andy,

Is the wifi and communication being updated in onemix or with the mix pad app and iPad in 1.9?

16

I was under the impression that whenever a wireless device sees an SSID it tries to make a connection(unless you explicitly tell it not to). To me that would still seem to cause issues if you have a few hundred phones polling the SSID and then the router trying to determine if they should connect or not. Am I wrong about this?

112T/IDR48/IDR16

17

No other devices will connect to your network, if you hard code the mac addresses of every piece of hardware in your router setup.

Limit the DHCP range, and only allow listed devices on your router.

My example;

192.168.1.254 Main Router Address

192.168.1.253 Airport Express (Ethernet connected)

DHCP Starting and ending Range 100 to 104.

192.168.1.100 74:XX:XX:XX:XX:90 USB Wireless TP-Link

192.168.1.101 54:XX:XX:XX:XX:6C VAIO Ethernet

192.168.1.102 78:XX:XX:XX:XX:B1 VAIO Wireless

192.168.1.103 A4:XX:XX:XX:XX:49 iPad

192.168.1.104 88:XX:XX:XX:XX:79 iPod Touch

Hard code the mac addresses for the iLive stuff too.

192.168.1.1 00:XX:XX:XX:XX:7C iLive iDR48 Mix Rack

192.168.1.2 00:XX:XX:XX:XX:86 iLive T112 Surface

192.168.1.3 00:XX:XX:XX:XX:DD iLive T112 Touch Screen

I choose not to have wireless security enabled, to prevent bottlenecks on data rate speed.

My router log never shows any other devices that connected to my network.

I do not believe polling an SSID causes interference on a network if that device does not handshake and secure a connection to begin with.

Most interference issues I experience, are in areas with many SSID’s. If I go into any venue or even outside, I use my wifi analyzer on my android phone. If it sees more then 5 different access points that have a -70 dbm or higher signal strength, I will surely encounter wireless interference. Once did a show outside a college dorm and noticed over 60 routers. I could not use wireless at all that day.

CRJ

Oswego, IL

T112 & iDR48

Sony F 1.73GHZ I7 8 Core

Win 7 Pro 500GB HD 8G RAM

TP-Link WR1043ND & Airport Express

18

Same venue, but perhaps different bands? Is something else causing interference? For example – a wireless microphone or guitar system?

In my situation I tried a 2.4GHz wireless router, only to find that the two-channels of 2.4GHz, spread-spectrum, frequency-hopping Sabine wireless owned by a particular frontman made it impossible for me to use my wireless LAN with his band.

I know you’re working with 5GHz. Just thought I might provoke a thought.

.

19

R.E SSID, After a bit of reading … it depends !

The access point transmits the SSID via a beacon message which is broadcast at mac level.

The clients can then just listen passively for broadcast messages:

https://www.wi-fiplanet.com/tutorials/article.php/1492071

The clients can however actively scan for access points by emitting probe request messages.

My guess would be when you have the wifi networks screen open on your iphone its actively scanning, otherwise its passive.

The problem with hiding your SSID is, you don’t stop the clients sending the probe messages when in active mode, and the Ap has to send beacons every 100ms anyway, so I’m not sure its much of a saving ! Also the SSID can still be found, which was the point I was making previously.

https://www.dslreports.com/faq/10907

I’ve have heard lots of people say when the venue fills up with customers they get wifi drop outs. A guess would be this is a signal / reflection issue as opposed to the punters mobile phones interrogating the AP… but I could be wrong.

Most of this depends how Apple / Google etc have implemented their wifi scanning, and Apple at least appear to be keeping that part of the code private!

Anyway hope this helps.

Andy

A&H

20

"R.E Comms drop outs over wifi we’ve been doing quite a lot of testing recently as were gearing up for OneMix release.

Our lost comms trigger is 10 seconds of no UDP comms between rack and Editor / MixPad."

I was going to post asking what the trigger delay was and maybe to increase it, but 10 seconds seems ample.

My experience so far (only had the kit a few weeks)

Venue 1: Empty venue during setup and soundcheck only; no dropouts.

Venue 2: laptop wired; no droputs on iPad in 2 hours continuous use

Venue 3: laptop wireless; iPad dropouts at 10min intervals or so. Editor on laptop no dropouts

Venue 4: laptop wired; iPad dropouts ~10min intervals again.

What I take from this is that the laptop wireless seems more reliable than the iPad, but that having the laptop wired or wireless doesn’t make any difference to the iPad (so radio congestion is probably not the issue).

It’ll be interesting when I go back to venue 2 in a couple of weeks to see if it’s stable there again.

The thing I find most annoying about the dropouts is that you have to connect, log in again and then switch the fader view back to what you were using. It would be much less of an issue if the app quietly reconnected without having to go through this each time, although I realise that caching the login details does have some security implications.

D-Link DIR-815, ‘new’ iPad, iOS 5