Evening everyone. I wanted to see if anyone else has had issues with streaming Amazon. We started the 4th season of Man in the High Castle and the video stutters or pauses several times through the episode. Everything has the latest firmware/updates and I have rebooted everything. Hardwired from home entrance to source (Nvidia Shield) The setup is:
AT&T Uverse 1Gb internet (fiber up to the house) - just ran speedtest and got 731 mbps down and 507 mbps up
Pace 5268 Gateway/Router (which I hate)
NetGear Orbi (but not used in this path - used only as a wireless access point)
TP-Link TL-SG1024 24-Port Gigabit Switch
Nvida Shield
Denon X4300H
Sony VPL-HW40ES projector
Netflix streams just fine, no issues.
Any ideas/thoughts are welcome.
Thank you.
My money is on this being a ground loop.
I say this because of my recent experience with digital audio stuttering. There seems to be a lot of company on this issue in multiple forms.
I had this issue with my 4K HTPC rebuild. The rebuild had this problem on an number of sources especially Amazon. Reboot would solve it for a while. I also had a shuffling sort of noise moving the mouse.
I was puzzled by it. This baffled my son also who is expert. After a lot of research I found that ground loops can cause this type of behavior in digital systems. I should point out there was no hum or buzz. The picture appeared fine but in retrospect it was not as good as it should have been.
So I lifted the ground from the HTPC power supply and grounded the case to the AV rack. This caused a big improvement. However I would get stuttering on occasions solved by reboot. I assumed, I think correctly, that the Microcenter power supply had an internal ground loop. So I have removed the Microcenter power supply and replaced it with the top end Corsair Gold power supply, which was more then twice the price of the Microcenter one. Microcenter did refund me my money by the way.
Anyhow this has totally solved the problem. I was able to remove the ground lift and the case to rack ground. There are no longer any issues and zero audio stuttering issues.
I don't know much about the Nividia Shield except that it has an internal power supply and no ground. Now I suspect you could have a ground loop between your Internet connections and your AV system, or even that your Shield is "piggy in the middle" in a ground resistance between your projector and receiver.
I know you have optical Internet service but code requires a grounding strip in the optical cable which is connected to your house ground and should be close to your panel.
As you probably know by now, I'm totally obsessional about how my systems are grounded. I'm glad I am, as it seems that with increasing complexity ground loops are now causing problems other than hums and buzzes.
So in my opinion this problem you are having is a ground loop problem until proved otherwise. This unfortunately may prove to be very elusive.
When I first ran into this audio stuttering I was certainly not thinking in terms of the cause being a ground loop, but that it proved to be. So I found as usual that I still have a lot to learn from the world of hard knocks.