TOPIC:

Is there a list of USB Wi-Fi dongles that are compatible with the SHD? The one that was included drops audio when playing hi-rez and I would like to get a better dongle. The one I tried wasn't recognized at all.

The problem with hi-rez playback has probably more to do with poor wifi reception than with the wifi-dongle.

Try a speedtest with your phone at the position of the minidsp. Do you get at least 10MBit downstream?

My workaround has been to use a small router in bridge mode to provide the SHD with an Ethernet connection. It streams everything flawlessly from the exact same location where the USB dongle fails. What I want is to reduce the clutter and get a higher quality Wi-Fi dongle.

the SHD came without wifi in the beginning for a reason.....

I helped out someone here the same way, using an inexpensive TP-Link wifi bridge to be able to use the wires ethernet port.  wifi dongles would fail, despite a strong signal.  

my trustworthy Squeezebox Touch would also have dropouts when playing hires when on wifi, wired no problem. 

wild suggestion...after I tried to upsample to 96kHz I ran into performance problems. Even while I'm using a wired connection.
Maybe the little SBC does not have enough cpu power to handle a fast wifi connection and play hi-res music at the same time.
The ethernet connection probably needs less cpu power...
That would explain why it works well with a seperate wifi-router bridge.

That won't help with the problem, I know...

itskaefer wrote:

That would explain why it works well with a seperate wifi-router bridge.

That won't help with the problem, I know...

I'm just going to assume it's a deficiency in the USB architecture. It's becoming increasingly disappointing that miniDSP's "streaming" products aren't built to, well, stream Wi-Fi. Might be time to move on to some other product with proper built-in Wi-Fi support.

A few month ago I had to connect an Atoll SDA200 Streamer Amp.
After an hour of testing and failing to connect to the local wifi I found out that this thing couldn't even do WPA2...
I had to add a seperate Wifi with WPA1 encryption to get the streamer work over wifi.
And there was no firmware upgrade to fix that. And it's an actual model!

So yeah...watch out what gear you buy. Many hifi manufacturers are way behind when it comes to network technology.

In answer to the OP, the onboard Linux will only work with the wifi 2.4GHz we ship I'm afraid. These dongles aren't driverless so I'm afraid that you can't just plug any random USB wifi dongles I'm afraid.. 

If you do need Wifi6 or compatibility with the newest network settings of some routers, it's indeed easier to grab an external Access point in this case.. 

On the comment of the USB not being able to handle high bit rate, has anybody started a support ticket with us on this topic? We stream high bit rate all the time in the office and never had any issues. USB is high speed on this board, it will easily handle streaming high bit rate so I don't think that it's related here.. We couldn't find some specific similar ticket on our forum with similar issues. We'd be happy to hear more if you start a support ticket?