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Assuming everything is hard-wired Cat5: if I daisy chain a MacBook Pro to a Sub to a Play:5 to another Play:5 to ultimately a router (Apple AirPort Express), will the MacBook Pro effectively be on the LAN (IP address, network performance)? I have terrible interference in my apartment so Sonos speakers are always dropping off the network and songs frequently drop out. I want to play music uncompressed and wonder if the best quality for that is the connect the MBP directly to the router or if I will get the same level of network performance by connecting the MBP directly into the Sub. Another reason for the question is that the MBP is next to the Sub and the router is about 50 feet away (as the cable runs).
You will be limited to 100Mbit since the switches in the dual-LAN are only 100Mbit. Also, if you are utilizing the link 100%, you might risk the streaming performance (albeit, I think it would be pretty hard to break it).



Also, the Sub doesn't have dual LANs IIRC, so you can't daisy-chain it? However, it's a ethernet network either way, so you can still mount a switch which the SUB and the macbook would share.



I would probably advice you to run the Macbook in WiFi either way, I assume both the airport express you have and the macbook supports 5GHz WiFi. That would probably not interference problem.
All the current PLAY units and SUB have a single Ethernet port. The old PLAY:5 Gen1 had dual ports, as do CONNECT and CONNECT:AMP. Plus BOOST and BRIDGE of course.