What Is Gigabit Ethernet On Imac

[Osman Briseno]

Justthought everyone here would be interested. I got a M1 Max 16" Macbook Pro when they were launched. Although at home I mostly use WiFi I got a Gigabit Ethernet adapter just in case. It's always useful to have one around, especially nowadays when you might need to use Dante or other Ethernet audio transport.

The shocking thing is, I stumbled upon some advice from BJ Buchalter (Metric Halo) recommending to use a dongle processionary (Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 2 adapter chained with a Thunderbolt 2 to Gigabit Ethernet one) instead of the usual hardware sold by Apple themselves. In my case, a Belkin adapter.

I have used Dante very little and I need to record a concert on Sunday, so of course I did my homework testing my Dante configuration, etc, in order to avoid pestering the FOH guy with stupid debugging time.

So, indeed, outrageous! Either the Realtek chip is extremely poor (I was told there was even profanity in the code comments

of a Realtek driver for FreeBSD) and I have indeed had horrible problems with them for other applications, and/or the

USB-C subsystem is really poorly designed (the Apple interface is connected to PCIe) and/or the Realtek driver is awful.

Realtek NIC's have always sucked in my experience. I've had several adapters using Realtek that I had lots of issues with on intel macs too. That being said I've done many hours recording Dante on StarTech adapters which use Realtek, so ...... ????

And what really worries me is, sometimes negligible defficiencies can add up in unexpected ways and ruin your day with difficult to debug problems. So it is always better to make sure that each and every element performs like it should.

Look at the latency graphs from Dante Controller running on the Mac Pro. I think they speak for themselves. The peak latency events occured when I locked the screen and unlocked it. The Belkin adapter had actual trouble, which is shocking given that these new ARM based machines are actual supercomputers with an unbelievable memory bandwidth.

Very interesting topic. I think Realtek used to publish a driver for macOS, though not sure it's compatible with the latest versions. Have you investigated using a non-default driver? Also interested how the D-Link adapter performs. It was a sad day when Apple stopped including an ethernet port on their laptops.

The driver currently used on Macos Ventura is made by Apple, it seems. I will try to look for other alternatives, but using a third party driver can be problematic in case you update the operating system itself.

I think I read somewhere (but there is much fuzzy stuff on "thah intarwebs") that Realteks were problematic until Apple made their driver. However, the problems I have observed are happening with the Apple provided builtin driver in Macos.

I have had good results with Dante on an Apple Silicon iMac. This was, however, with the Apple Gigabit Adapter in the power blob (probably Thunderbolt in some manner?) and not the same type of TB/USB device that would be used with a laptop.

For example, for a recent live musical we did, I had 64 channels of Dante coming into the M1 iMac using Dante Virtual Soundcard. All but a few of these were recorded using Pro Tools running under Rosetta on Monterrey. The show was close to 3 hours long and I am not aware of any lost audio. The Dante traffic even was on a shared corporate network without QoS, although all the Dante devices were on a single switch and our stuff lives on its own VLAN.

Like most IGMPv3 devices, Apple's network stack will drop down to IGMPv2 compatibility mode if it sees an IGMPv2 packet. But it seems to stay there permanently. So if some IGMPv2 device ever appeared on the network, even briefly, the switches would drop down into compatibility mode. After a time if the device left, the switch would revert back to IGMPv3 but the Mac would not. The result was that the Mac would ignore the IGMPv3 multicast group queries, and the switch would drop it from the PTP multicast group. That would make Dante lose clock. The solution for our specific case was that our network guy set up the switch with a static subscription to the PTP multicast stream for that specific port. That way even if the Mac stopped sending IGMP group reports, the switch would still send the PTP packets.

But it was trickier to make it work, being USB-C. Curiously latency with the Thunderbolt adapter is a bit higher. But seems to be more solid. I mean, I had to do some voodoo macumba in order to make the hub work, deleting the interface and recreating again when I changed USB ports. Otherwise it would not achieve lock.

I can imagine countless situations in which someone goes to record a concert with a $4000 laptop and a $25 crappy Ethernet adapter only to find that it won't work while others (maybe with built in Ethernet port) are capable of doing it.

On one side there is the "Gigabit Ethernet PHY" (DP83867E) from TexasInstruments to provide the RJ45-Ethernet. This chip supports the RGMII-Interface. On the other side there is pretty the same chip, but provides a another kind of ethernet.

Now my question:

Is it possible to link these two chips from TI over the RGMII-Interface and "ready" is the Converter?

->Can I link two PHYs? Or must there a MAC in the middle, which easly pass the messages threw? When yes, what chip do you advise?

Also - do you think it makes sense to get a 256GB SSD internal drive and get libraries/projects to external HDs (via the 4 Thunderbolt 3 ports) or it makes sense to spend the money I'll put in the external HDs into buying an 512GB SSD internal instead and putting the projects and libraries there?

As for SSD size, really depends what size your sample library is, and whether you can reduce it down to 'critical' samples/presets easily and put them on the SSD and still have enough free space left. Also what else do you have installed on your machine - only you can decide really.

For me, 256GB SSD is plenty enough, i only have my larger libraries such as drum samples on the SSD so they load quicker. Smaller libraries (Although bigger in mass when totalled up), i put on an external. But this is a machine purely for audio, and i generally place on the SSD 'most used' items. So for me, projects always go off onto a larger (non-ssd) drive.

I got to say the libraries all ran exceedingly well on my iMac SSD, the trouble is I had no space for them. SO they've been relegated to a fast external HDD (WD Black). It's doing the job, I hope to one day save up for several terabytes of SSD, but until then I Have to put up with the slower loading times.

Good to know about Vienna Ensemble Pro allowing to use those 3rd party plugins - makes sense to have that door for the future since I plan to buy another iMac or Mac Pro in the future (the Mac Mini would then work as an aside DSP Server with Vienna Ensemble Pro).

I have an aging MacPro 2009/2010 that continues to meet my audio and video needs. I also have a number of VI libraries, including orchestral ones. Those libraries take up a whole lot of space. Because of this, I have three 1-TB SSDs and one 500-GB SSD (all internal) to house the libraries. I can not imagine owning these libraries without the extra drives.

Regarding the 10GB ethernet. . . I also own VSL's VEPro 6 in addition to an aging MacMini. That ethernet connection with VEPro 6 works great as the two computers spread processing power for some of my larger orchestral sequencing projects.

With all of this said, the new MacMini Pro computers look impressive! I don't know how these new computers would work with heavy-duty 4K and HD video editing, but it seems that they'd work well for audio work! Looking forwards to hearing (reading) your experience with the new purchase.

Well, my friend who's a photographer had the belief that SSD's wouldn't corrupt, and last week his main SSD went losing him a load of files (Was so confident that he didn't have them backed up) and it was only 3 years old. Hence why i said make sure you have a backup solution budgeted if you don't already. Out of all the machines i come in contact with, that's the first SSD i've known to completely fail out of the blue AND it came after a power cut i believe, which i didn't think they would be so sensitive with.

So, we really don't know how SSD will stack up in the real world vs the established time that traditional HDD's have been around, but so far, experiences and lab testing certainly suggests they're FAR sturdier, and in a small casing like the Mini an SSD is just so much better in regards to heat/power requirements so yeah, that reduced heat and power means a much more improved stability i think... Just don't overlook that backup tho! ))

Anything that runs on SSD you will notice a big speed difference, which is why i say put your most used elements on there. Check the specs on the drives that you can configure for that Mac too, the different capacity drives can also differ in performance believe it or not (i.e. some larger drives are slower). I've no knowledge on those options though, but i have seen it written in regards to other people buying Mac's and asking for advice on here.

Well thanks for the tips - I'm trying to get the big picture about what the options/results are with the mac mini but from what I'm reading/watching it truly is an unexpected very good option (I was expecting to pay much more for a new macbook pro laptop which I don't really need at the moment).

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