Make your (Auralic) streamer faster for free!

A while ago, the Dutch importer for Auralic came to us with a very specific problem: a few Auralic customers with a Netgear Orbi (specifically the RBK850) were having buffering issue. It took an average of 6 seconds for a track to start. Whether Alpha Audio wanted to take a look… Of course! We like a challenge… and it was.

Quite honestly, at first we thought that putting a switch behind the Netgear satellite and pulling a cable would fix it. Unfortunately, that turned out not to be the case. At Rispens (where we did the initial tests), that didn’t solve it. We did fix a Roon-issue, but that’s not what we came for.

Different router?

Attempt two was to temporarily install another router; a BR500 of the same brand: Netgear. And lo and behold: the problem disappeared into thin air! That’s strange of course… Although we know that complex Mesh systems like the Netgear Orbi series do a lot in the background. However, turning off QoS or security systems turned out to make no difference…

Since we now know that the problem completely disappears with a different router, we know that it is either completely down to the Netgear Orbi, or that it is the combination of the Auralic with Orbi… We needed to dig a little deeper.

Lightning DS

If we investigate a little further, we find out that the problem only occurs when using Lightning DS. With Roon, or other apps (Bubble UPnP for example) this problem does not pop up. That shows it’s in Auralic’s software…. Which works in a certain way that causes Orbi to “stress out”. Why this happens, we can’t investigate on site: we have to go into the lab for that. (And as previously reported: it’s not due to QoS services or security systems in the Orbi).

Network Analysis

To capture some network traffic, we grabbed an old Netgear GS724T and ‘mirrored’ some ports. By connecting the Orbi system and the Auralic to this switch and peering in through another port (the ‘mirror), we can use Wireshark (software) to see what is happening on the network.

Now there is an awful lot happening on a network. So the trick is to filter and start looking for patterns.

Initially, we see a lot of errors and “retransmissions” between the iPad and the Auralic. We thought that was where the problem was, but it turns out that this is always the case. Also with the other router (BR500). But then the Auralic is acting normal (tracks start fast). In short: although very striking that there is so much activity from the iPad (not from an Android device with the Linn or Bubble-UPnP app), that is not the problem.

However, what we notice after peeking and analyzing for a while is that DNS requests are much slower with the Orbi. The BR500 handles them much faster than the Orbi RBK850. It’s a 100 times faster at least…. and if we add that up it’s at least 3 seconds extra…. Would that be it?

DNS server change!

Now, we ALWAYS recommend changing the default DNS settings in the router to Cloudflare (1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1) for speed and privacy reasons. So be sure to do that. However, for this study, we had left everything at default….

What is strange in this case is that it is not getting faster…. It’s still slow. If we check in the laptop whether the DNS is changed (ipconfig /all), we see that it is still on 192.168.0.1… That does not necessarily mean anything, but what it does indicate, is that there is an extra layer in the router. And that can slow things down. Time for another approach.

To the Auralic then

We will put the address (1.1.1.1) directly into the Auralic then. To do that, we log into the Auralic by typing the ip address into the address bar. then we go to Hardware Setup.

Under this menu you will see all the network settings. We connected the Auralic with a wire (for the port-mirror), but it works the same way if you are connected wirelessly. We disable DHCP and then go to the DNS field. There we click on the pen and enter 1.1.1.1. We save the settings and wait a moment. When the Auralic finishes booting up, we try playing a song again….And yep! It’s a lot faster now!

Bottom line: in this case, it’s a specific problem between Lightning DS and the Netgear Orbi RBK850 that doesn’t like how Auralic handles DNS.

Other streamers?

As mentioned, we actually do always recommend choosing your own DNS service and enter those addresses in the router. Cloudflare DNS is a lot faster than the stock, provider DNS. Google is also faster, but Google already knows enough about us. So for privacy reasons, we don’t recommend that.

We estimate that you will have a slightly faster experience if you use Cloudflare DNS in the router. Do you want to go a little further and does your streamer allow you to manually enter a DNS address? Then we recommend that: the more direct, the better.

We’d love to hear what it did in your system! Let us know in the comments.