Devialet Phantom - Network Logic?

[kg.fredrik.klein]

Hi all, 

I´ve got a setup of 5 Phantom 1 Golds and 2 Phantom II scattered around the house and they usually work great since I upgraded to a Ubiquity Unifi solution with multiple Access Points. But I´m interested in one thing. If I play them all in multiroom mode to get music in the whole house I´m only seeing network activity to one of the units (usually the master) in the Unifi app. 

How do they communicate? Only two are connected to ethernet, the rest is WIFI. I don´t think that PLC will work across an entire house, or am I wrong? They are all in auto mode (not forced to wifi or PLC).  

It also seems to work better if I choose a master that is connected to ethernet (which makes sense really). 

Does anyone know?

Good question.  I think I can shed a little bit of light but would be very interested to learn more if others have better insights into how this works.

The first part of the answer is, in the absence of Ethernet, Wi-Fi or PLC (but I think you knew that ;-)

1. Wi-Fi.  Here my understanding and my observations contradict each other.  My understanding has been that the Phantoms build their own peer-to-peer network, which if the case would explain why you do not see the traffic in Unifi.  However my observations (since reinstalling my stereo pair after significantly reconfiguring my own network recently) is that both units are connected to my Wi-Fi network and I can see downstream traffic to both in Unifi.  So what I am seeing does not look like a peer-to-peer network at all.  Go figure.

2. PLC.  In answer to your question yes, PLC will at least in theory work over your entire house.  Or, more specifically, over one electrical phase (or segment).  The fuses or circuit breakers on each spur shouldn’t attenuate the signal significantly, although surge protectors and similar filters will.  Also, the performance and therefore speed decreases as the SNR worsens so the more “noisy” (electrically, not acoustically) devices you have plugged in the more problematic PLC will be.

Worth pointing out that lots of things can affect your Wi-Fi performance including several things that you do control (placement, band, (some) interference etc) and some that you don’t (congestion, “noisy neighbours”), and that these can also fluctuate significantly over time.  Pretty much the same is true of your power circuit, especially if you live in an apartment block.  So in my mind this is a rationale for letting the Phantoms auto select (“Auto” setting in the app) their interconnection.  Presumably they are programmed to select the connection with the best SNR.

Don’t know if this helped at all.  I would certainly be very interested if anybody has more insight into how paired Phantoms intercommunicate.


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Thank you very much for that very comprehensive answer! 

1. I don´t think that they have a peer-to-peer network as it would show up when I do a network sweep in the Unifi System (it even detects networks of neighbours 500 meter away, as we have 3 AP´s outside). If they don´t have any other mumbo-jumbo protocall but that seems less probable. 

2. The PLC might be one of the answers but I´m still a bit sceptic about that because I do have very low wifi coverage in our big bathroom thats clad with quite thick granit tiles...and I tried to have a stereo setup in the bathroom with the Phantom II´s but that never really worked great, which would be an indication of poor WIFI reception and no connection via PLC. 

3. It might just be the unifi-system that doesn´t show network traffic the way I thought it did....

4. Or it might just be me beeing a nerd with too much interest in how it works instead of spending time enjoying THAT it works