It's not fair. I told you my Wi-Fi was
fixed. It worked perfectly for a week.
Then right after we uploaded this video,
it made a big liar out of me. I hate it
when that happens. Intermittent problems are the worst.
Thankfully, now I have this. That's
right, three cheap Wi-Fi adapters and a
USB hub. Okay, admittedly it's not that
impressive, but the software behind it is. Through the power of spectrum
analysis and packet capture, we're going to be digging deeper than ever into what
causes Wi-Fi to randomly lose performance or drop out. And even though
it wasn't our intention, we're going to be exposing some of the BS marketing
that Sony uses to sell their wireless home audio systems. BS marketing that I
unknowingly spread when I did a sponsored video on the very product that
has been causing me all this trouble. Just like I'm about to spread this segue
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First up, I need to show you guys how I got bamboozled into thinking that I had
the solution last time. Every Wi-Fi card
is constantly looking for wireless networks. It can do this passively, just
listening for different networks to announce their presence, or it can do it
actively by sending out a probe request and then looking at the replies that
come back. Surprisingly, the active method is actually a lot more power
efficient. So, that's what most devices do by default. That means that when I
was going around pointing my wispy antenna at anything and everything in
the house, the Wi-Fi card in my laptop
was happily probing away in the background, blasting out enough power
that even my very high tech directional antenna was able to pick up the signal.
The only thing that is hard to explain at this point is why sometimes it didn't
seem to pick anything up, cuz that's what led us to believe that the source
of the interference could be malfunctioning light switches. I mean, I
should have dismissed this theory as quickly as I dismissed the 2.4 GHz
microwave. Only a grossly malfunctioning
900 MHz device should be capable of emitting any kind of 5 GHz interference.
like so defective that it wouldn't even pass compliance testing. But in fairness
to me with everything I've been through with these switches, nothing would
surprise me at this point. That is correct. It's still my bad, though. I should have
dug deeper. And a good place to start digging would be the hidden wireless
SSID that we determined is associated with the base unit here of Sony's HTA9
wireless audio system. Last time around,
we took Sony at their word when they claimed that they were using wireless
sound specification 4.0 to deliver wireless audio to the speakers
distributed around my family room. But looking back on it, if both the freebie
Wi-Fi analyzer on my phone and the paid
channeler software on my laptop saw a hidden Wi-Fi network, then maybe
wireless audio specification 4.0 0 is
just Wi-Fi. To check our theory, we'll
be using MetaGeek's channelizer again with the Wisey adapter, and we'll be
looking for that familiar shape that we know is the Sony base unit. It looks
like it's around channels 44 and 48 today, although that does tend to vary
from day to day, which is part of the reason for my problems. We can see
though there's a hardware address associated with this. So, let's remember
that as we peel back the next layer of this problematic onion with a new piece
of software from MetGeek called Tonic.
Wait, that's Wire Shark. Tonic. Tonic
works by capturing spectrum information also from the Wise Spy, but at the same
time by capturing all of the wireless
network traffic that is bouncing around in the house using off-the-shelf USB
Wi-Fi adapters. Following Metaggeek's recommendation, we went with three of
these Eddax EW7833 UAC units that retail for about $50
each. Each of these has three antennas
and supports 3x3 spatial streams, which means that they're able to take
advantage of multipath transmission to significantly improve throughput. And
more importantly, it means that it's extremely unlikely that they're going to
miss anything when we start capturing traffic. Just for transparency, we're
probably going to do a little bit of movie magic here and show you guys a
mixture of live and pre-captured data.
We got a ton of audio dropouts and other artifacts when we were testing this out
a few days ago. But I think it's a law of the universe that the second the
camera starts rolling, your product demonstration will fail. All right, the
first thing that we're going to do then is limit our view to the 5 GHz spectrum,
then we're going to click on show hidden. And sure enough, there's a
hidden network with the Mac Address that we noticed in Channeler. That is our
base unit that I hid on top of the other base unit. Get it? Haha, that's a
subwoofer. Sorry. Anywh who, when we click on that network, we get a list of
access points, which is just one because
even though I did gesture to one of my Ruckus APs, they are not the problem. It
is entirely this. It's on channel 44 and
it has five clients, which makes sense because we've got four wireless speakers
around the room and then also the subwoofer. When we click on the access
point, we get some more detail about it and we get some graphs and charts that
summarize the traffic that's being transmitted by it. If it can show us all
this information about the AP's radio, that means according to our contact at
Metgeek, there is pretty much no doubt that Sony's wireless sound
specification, it's just a typical Wi-Fi 4 network rather than some special
technology they've invented. Though, I mean, that does kind of make sense since
getting some new wireless technology certified for 5 GHz globally would be a
monumental task. But then from my point of view, they should just say it's
Wi-Fi. That would have made troubleshooting this a lot easier from
the start. Looking at the airtime distribution now, it's interesting that
basically all the traffic sent out by this base unit is broadcast rather than
being sent to a particular client. What that means then is that this base unit
is just blasting Wi-Fi signals out into the air for any device that's listening
without any regard for whether the signal actually gets to all of the
speakers or some of the speakers or the speakers and something else. And then
it's just up to each speaker to take that data and sort it out into which
channel it's supposed to play. I suppose every speaker just gets all the data for
every channel, which might explain some of why they are not able to make
efficient use of the spectrum. I mean, I
can kind of see why they took this approach since they need to keep latency
low enough to keep audio sync to the picture, but clearly it's not working. A
little weird, but not super weird yet.
When we switch over to the client list here, we're going to see a pretty high
percentage of retransmitted packets. Remember, these are going from these
guys back to the base station. This retry column here means that when the
speakers are sending some kind of data back to the bass unit, maybe it's timing
information or related to the room correction, I don't know, whatever it
is, it has to resend that data quite
often because the base unit isn't receiving it on the first attempt.
Normally, you would want to see less than about 10% retransmission on your
wireless network and less than 2% if you're dealing with something like voice
over IP. anything higher and you're going to start to notice an impact on
performance. In this case though, I
don't think that's the source of our problems because if we click through and
look at the number of packets being sent by the speakers, it is such a tiny
amount of traffic that even if all four
of them had to reattempt 100% of the packets they sent, we'd only be looking
at a few hundred packets spread out over 10 minutes. Uh, I don't think that's the
issue. So then we've determined that this Sony surround sound soundbar is
using plain boring old Wi-Fi and that it
is basically just spewing audio data out for the speakers to pick up and turn
into sound with very little communication going back from the
speakers to the base unit. Just the occasional acknowledgement and little
bits of what Tonic classifies as quality of service data. That still doesn't tell
us what's wrong. We're going to have to go even deeper. Let's take this data and
put it into Wireshark, which is a free
network capture and analysis tool that will let us go through each individual
frame to try to determine what's happening. Wire uses the exact same data
as Tonic, but it's not quite so userfriendly. where Tonic organizes
things into networks and graphs and charts that we can easily explore.
Wireshark is more like standing in front of a fire hose of raw data. In the
default view, we get every bit of traffic from every device on every
network that our wireless interfaces can see over the same 10 minutes that we
were looking at in tonic. I think it might take 10 minutes just to scroll to
the bottom of this thing. Um, nobody wants to watch me do that, right?
Luckily, Wire Shark has a powerful filter system that we can use to turn
the fire hose into, well, a smaller fire
hose. We know we're interested in what's happening on channels 44 and 48. So,
we'll start by narrowing our view down to those. Okay, we're on the right track
here. It looks like almost all of the transmissions we see here are multiccast
data coming from the base unit. It looks like it's sending out a couple of frames
of data every 2 or 3 milliseconds. Let me just scroll down a little bit. See if
there's anything interesting. Ah, right
here it switches the channel of the multiccast to channel 48. And if we look
in the delta column, we see that it was 74 milliseconds since the previous
transmission. That is pretty significant. We mere mortals don't
typically perceive lags shorter than 8 to 12 milliseconds. So when we see the
deltas of 0 to 3 milliseconds leading up to this switch, those would pass us by
totally unnoticed. 74 milliseconds
though, that's a lot. What's weird though is that there is nothing else
happening on these channels at this time. So while it's normal for a
wireless network to jump around from channel to channel in order to reduce
interference, if there's nothing else going on, why does it switch? Maybe
we'll see something if or when it switches back. Ah, at 3996,
it goes back to 44 with another 76
millisecond lag. There's also a huge jump in the frame number here. So, that
means that there's a bunch of other traffic that we're not seeing because of
our filter. Let's turn our filter off for a minute. There's a bunch of traffic
on other channels at this time, but it looks like it's mostly access points
talking to other devices and mostly on
channels that are at the other end of the spectrum from the Sony base unit.
Let's change up our filter again and see if there are any other long delays on
our channels. Let's say anything more than 50 milliseconds.
Wow, some of these are more than 100
milliseconds. A tenth of a second. That
is a massive delay, which could totally explain the audio dropouts that we got
when we were testing. So now, okay, we're going to take this and we're going
to jump down to a period where we know that the audio had serious problems.
And what in the world is going on here?
This thing is changing channels more than once a millisecond. And it looks
like, yeah, it's sending out more data
more often. So, it goes from sending two
frames on one channel every two to three milliseconds to four or more packets on
two channels as often as every millisecond.
Let's check the whole lower end of the 5 GHz spectrum just in case something else
is making it behave. No, there's
nothing. Like, there's bits and pieces of other traffic, but it's not much. And
I'm not seeing anything on 44 or 48 other than the Sony gear, which means
that our Ghost Hunter episode looking around for the source of the
interference was pretty close to a real
episode of Ghost Hunter, meaning we were looking for something that didn't exist
and misinterpreting the data we collected. The true culprit then is just
Sony, who has no reason to be shifting
channels or sending out more frames like this. At least not one that's obvious to
me or to our friends at Metaggeek. Unless it's ghosts. No, I'm just
kidding. Which means that unless Sony re-engineers how this thing works, I'm
going to keep having this problem and so will many other owners of this wireless
setup. I'm going to have to append both the last video that we did searching for
the source as well as the sponsored video that we did on these because
obviously I don't want anyone buying them. Now, I want to give a massive
shout out to MetGeek, though for providing the tools we needed to diagnose this today, as well as their
software. Uh, we're hoping that our Labs team is going to make excellent use of
that relationship in the coming months and years. The path forward for me then
is what I guess just to do what so many of you suggested last time around and
put an AV receiver in here and then find a wife approved way of running wires, I
guess, over to the surrounds. I'm going to miss the room correction
from these Sony's, that's for sure. Like that was the cool thing that sold me on
them was a they sound really great and b you could kind of put them anywhere and
you get a really convincing surround experience. But I mean, who knows? Maybe
in the grand scheme of things that sucks too and I'd be better off with some
basic distance correction and EQ from an AVR. With some help from the Labs team,
we're going to find the answer to that. And while we're at it, hopefully we can
shed some light on who has the best mainstream room correction. Because darn
it, I want to stop fighting with this. I want to do it right this time. Like I do
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off. If you guys enjoyed this video, why don't you check out the first time we
worked with MetGeek? It was a long time ago, but it was a really good look at
their channelizer software and how it can be used to find non Wi-Fi sources of
interference, which if you'll recall was what I thought I was looking for.