- Lately I've been Mr. unpopular around my house,
and I'm sure a lot of you can relate
whether it's buffering on the Mrs' Netflix or
a lag spike on Junior's game or an oh so important
video call that I can't miss. When there are problems
with the Wi-Fi, the first thing that happens is.
- Dad, Wi-Fi's broken.
- And the issue that's plagued me
for the last few months turned out to be a doozy.
See, I've got these speakers in my family room
that use a standard called wireless Audio Specification 4.0
which isn't Wi-Fi, but it uses the same spectrum as Wi-Fi
meaning that it is susceptible
to the same kind of interference.
And because it streams high bit rate audio
with very low latency, any small amount
of interference can sound a little something like this.
(TV playing intermittently)
- Whole family movie night ruined.
Thankfully we got to the bottom of it.
You guys are never gonna believe what was
spewing RF interference out into my house.
And as you come along with me on this journey of discovery
I am sure you're gonna pick up some tips and tricks
that'll take you from Wi-Fi zero to Wi-Fi hero.
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(upbeat techno music)
- Like any other problem these days
the first thing we did was Google it to see
if anyone else was experiencing the same issue.
And we came across an owner's thread over on AVS Forum
with over 400 pages which is either a really good sign
or a really bad one. And as it turns out, it is chock full
of users complaining about exactly the same audio cutouts
and stuttering that I'm experiencing here at home.
The good news is that thread was full of useful information
that ultimately set us down the right path.
Sony's HT-A9 like any other wireless device,
are not truly wireless. I mean, they've got wires
coming out of them right here so that they can be
powered by the wall
but they receive their audio stream wirelessly
rather than through a traditional speaker wire.
They use the same five gigahertz spectrum
as the Wi-Fi devices in your home
which can be both a good thing and a bad thing.
On the one hand, five gigahertz Wi-Fi is great
for high bandwidth communication. So the audio quality
from these things, it's actually great. The problem
is that while five gigahertz was really clear
back when it came out, it was the perfect way to get away
from all the interference in the 2.4 gigahertz bands,
these days, almost everything that's using Wi-Fi
in your house is gonna be on five gigahertz which means,
well, you see a lot of the same problems.
Of course, we don't know yet that that's the problem.
So one of our first troubleshooting steps is to find out
what the Wi-Fi environment around us looks like.
And you can do that with one of those Wi-Fi analyzer
phone apps that are often available for free.
These will show you visually what SSIDs,
or wireless networks are around you,
what channels they're occupying and their relative strength
as measured by your phone's antenna. They're super handy.
And what we are looking for is an unnamed SSID
that could be being transmitted by our
Sony transmission box here, and I think we've got it.
There's some weaker signals from my outdoor access point
but there's this really strong one, I'm right here next
to it, that pops up once in a while and then goes away
called hidden SSID. Could it be as simple as just
taking the rest of my Wi-Fi network and moving everything
off of those channels. Here is my wireless dashboard,
you can see a lot of the diagnosis for this happened
on a completely different day, when that hidden network was
occupying different channels that I was trying to clear out.
So we're still gonna go through the process for you guys.
Let's go ahead and just wipe out everything in that range
and okay, theoretically you clear out the channels,
should be crystal clear, right? Yes, but only temporarily.
Within a couple of days, the issue was back. Why?
Because that hidden SSID had jumped to a
completely different channel, but believe it or not
that's not a bug, that's a feature, because most people
are gonna have all of their wireless devices configured
to automatically select the best channel. Well,
they actually all end up hopping around depending on
what else is going on in the environment around you.
So, Sony, in their wisdom, has the ability to say, hmm, hey
that's not quite working for me. I'm gonna sit here
in stand by and passively scan which channel is
most free and I'm gonna jump onto that so the next time
you power me up I'm gonna be good to go.
And unfortunately, while you can disable that channel
hopping, if you want to manually manage all
of your channels, there's no way to tell it
which channel you want it to stay on.
Sony, could you just let me pick it
and then I could've solved this problem.
'Cause as it turns out, even if you disable it,
if for whatever reason the unit loses power, it could
automatically select a different one
and then you've gotta go back on the dashboard again.
And besides, as it turned out, even with this set manually
to a separate channel for my Wi-Fi,
the problem wasn't solved anyway.
It's time to bring out the big guns or well small
but effective guns, which is totally a thing.
This is the Wi-spy and long time viewers will have seen
something like it before. It's a spectrum analyzer,
which, combined with Meta-geek's software, allows us to see
in real time any legitimate traffic or unwanted interference
across both, the 2.4 gigahertz and five gigahertz spectrums.
I went with with this because I'm familiar
with the software already, but you don't have to.
For as little as 20 bucks, you can get yourself set up with
an SDR or software defined radio that with,
often free software, can be used to do anything
from Wi-Fi analysis like we're doing today,
to amateur radio, to building your own GSM network
and so on and so forth. They're super cool and we're gonna
put some learning resources in the video description
down below. For now though, let's compare what we see
in Meta-geek's Software channelizer and what we see
in our free cell phone app. Our SSIDs have very similar
relative strengths and positioning in the different
five gigahertz channels
but what we can't see in here is all the traffic.
And there it is, our unknown SSID, with a whole
bunch of traffic. This is color coded according
to the intensity. So blue would be the lightest,
red would be the most intense and this is all yellow
with a spot of orange. Here's the thing about Wi-Fi,
it can transmit over top of this kind of background noise
but it's slow and it's unreliable.
So what Wi-Fi devices are designed to do is
wait their turn nicely in order to optimize their
use of the available spectrum. That's one of the reasons
that you always wanna make sure
that you center your 2.4 gigahertz networks
over one, six and twelve, rather than using the in-betweens
which will just cause unnecessary interference
making them not play with each other nicely.
But because this is wireless audio there's no such thing
as waiting to send a packet. You don't have a ton of time
to buffer data, because otherwise the user is gonna notice
the audio in the video being out of sync.
So we pretty much can't use any channels that the HT-A9 is
occupying and yet it went and it picked channels that have
SSIDs on them. Or so I thought. I've never been so
disappointed to have something working perfectly.
'Cause here's the thing, even though those SSIDs
are broadcasting on the same channel as the
Sony audio system well you're not actually transmitting
any data unless you're doing giant file copies.
So it turns out that wasn't even the problem.
Thankfully, when you step up your game
to one of these antennas, you can identify interference
from all kinds of different non-Wi-Fi devices.
Meta-Geek actually provides this really helpful little
graphic to show you what signatures
of different interfering devices might look like.
They don't include a microwave, but that's okay.
I can show you that. We're on 2.4 gigahertz.
Ever had your Bluetooth headphones cut out when
you're trying to microwave something in the kitchen?
Well, I'm gonna show you guys why.
See this waterfall over time. It goes from traffic
on the established 2.4 gigahertz channels to...
(roaring noise)
This is a good opportunity to show you guys
why that's not a problem for five gigahertz though.
Look at that. Nothing. Well, we know there's something
we just gotta find it.
This is the point in the video where things start to look
a little more like a ghost hunting reality show
than tech tips. But I swear to you what I'm doing is legit.
We found the best results are from wrapping the entire Wi-Fi
box and then making ourselves kind of a, a cone
around the antenna. In this way we can turn our
omni-directional antenna into a directional antenna
which is gonna make it a lot easier for us to zone in
on smaller sources of interference. Now I already alluded
to there being some movie magic in this video.
We absolutely nailed it yesterday. We found it,
we screen capped it. It was a fluke. I don't think
we're gonna get it again but we're gonna give it a shot
and failing that we'll show you guys the recorded footage.
Let's go.
For the doubters that I'm sure are out there, yes,
our directional antenna does work. You can tell
because when I point it at our source of interference
rather than away from it... Boom, look at it light up.
Ah, cool. Right? Then watch, I'm gonna turn it around
and that red zone is going to go away. Of course this is
not a very granular tool in its current form,
but we can fix that. Because we're specifically looking
for devices that are interfering with our wireless
audio setup, we only care about this narrow little slice
of spectrum right here and we're gonna use a feature
in this software called Device Finder.
So we're focused in on this and basically we're gonna
go around and look for problematic spikes.
It's not the cat. Whoa. Oh we did actually get
a little spike there. Hello?
Christmas? Christmas interference? Oh guys, can you...
It wasn't Christmas, the kids turned the TV back on
and the TV's over there. The Christmas tree's clean.
(laughing)
Oh interesting. This is sending out pulses. Printers.
Oh, we have some Z wave lights.
I got a little blip.
Really anything that plugs in is a possibility.
Smart thermostats, smart lights.
And now I told these to use the 2.4 gigahertz network.
Oh, oh oh. There's something going on here.
This is so far away from the family room.
See the thing about five gigahertz is that its
limited transmission range can actually again be a feature
rather than a bug because it's much less likely to interfere
with another device that's far away. Even if your Wi-Fi
reception might not be as good as it was on 2.4.
This is quite substantial though. Wait. Even after
I walked away I was getting these spikes.
Yeah, these Govee smart lights are definitely kicking
off five gigahertz.
Oh, we are getting all kinds of interference in the
mechanical room. I don't know that it's from these guys
specifically because what's interesting is when I move back
a little bit, all of a sudden it's all over the... Oh no
it's really, it's calmed down a little bit.
Boiler? Bueller? You know what it is. I know why
there's so much in here. Come on over here Brandon.
Yep. Oh that's spicy. I know why there's so much in here.
It is what you found yesterday. It looks like the issue is
my Z-wave network. As I walk into the room and trigger
motion from my Z-wave switches. Yep. There we go.
Look at them go. Oh man. That's why it's so hard to nail
down where the interference is coming from because I've got
a hundred of these bloody things all over my house.
To be clear it may not actually be Jasco's fault
specifically. I had some really weird Z-Wave issues recently
that I was diagnosing with one of the developers
of Z-wave JS for home assistant where he said,
and this is a direct quote, I haven't seen some
of these log messages before and I've seen a lot of logs.
So it could be these devices, but it could also be some
of the other Z-Wave devices on my network that are causing
in particular some really sticky, non-optimal routing.
That means there's a lot of hots going around
anytime anything's happening on the network.
We managed to resolve it enough temporarily
that I'm able to actually, you know, configure devices.
But it's clear that it's an ongoing issue that I need to
resolve with my Z-wave devices. So the good news is that I
know what the problem is but the bad news is that
the long term solution is probably an upcoming Switch
from inovelli that doesn't even exist yet, or maybe even
going all the way back to dumb switches. For now kids,
I think you're stuck with bad audio sometimes up here.
Can you maybe use the theater instead?
- Yeah.
- No, I don't want to.
- You don't want to
- The theater's better.
- But you don't like the theater.
- I like both. I like the TV better.
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- It's possible that six gigahertz Wi-Fi is going to
alleviate some of these issues. For those of you
who don't know, six gigahertz Wi-Fi is opening up
more spectrum to Wi-Fi so that there's gonna be
less congestion. But the flip side is that as soon as you
open up that spectrum and everybody like piles into it,
you're bound to run into these sort of problems yet again.
If you guys enjoyed this video, who knows maybe you'd enjoy
the original video I did, taking a much more in depth look
at the Wi-spy and channelizer softwares
from like seven years ago or something.