Yes, you're completely right in the network analysis. Except for one thing: it being self inflicted. I have never enabled address reservation, and only yesterday found out the BDP1 has a reserved address. That was the source of my question and reason to start this thread. How come the BDP-1 does that and is it necessary?
The other question I had was why it was listed twice: once as BDP-1 and once as Bryston-Bdp-1 (see screen dumps). I deleted them both, rebooted the router, verified that the reserved address was not enabled and played over Airplay. No problems whatsoever.
Satisfied that worked again, I switched the BDP1 on again. Although I did not see it listed in the Router, switching it on alone frustrated the Airplay again.
Switching it off again re-enabled Airplay.
So there is definitely something wrong here.
I just wondered if the double listing might be caused by testing another BDP-1 in my place, before I got my own machine. It just might not have been re-assigned yet. Anyway I revoked the double instance, and its gone (at least for now) That did not resolve the Airplay-interference though.
reading the following quote of the DIR855 documentation it does make sense to reserve address for the BDP1? But then would it not be logical that in its own settings the BDP was given the static option, as opposed to the DHCP option that it had in my case?
quote
Add/Edit DHCP Reservation
This option lets you reserve IP addresses, and assign the same IP address to the network device with the specified MAC address any time it requests an IP address. This is almost the same as when a device has a static IP address except that the device must still request an IP address from the D-Link router. The D-Link router will provide the device the same IP address every time. DHCP Reservations are helpful for server computers on the local network that are hosting applications such as Web and FTP. Servers on your network should either use a static IP address or use this option.
end quote
Hope to find out soon...Thanks
Marius
Seems you have at least one self-inflicted issue here:
1) When the DHCP assigns an IP address it's leased for a duration and won't be re-assigned unless the lease expired or if the client requests to renew the lease (still might be same ip address). So as long as the lease of the IP address isn't expired, expect the reserved IP to be listed in the DHCP client list. One gotcha with older routers, is that if the DHCP server doesn't log the assigned IP address on a reboot, you need to reboot all of the downstream devices as well.
2) It also appears that you might be requesting the DHCP server to assign an IP address (via MAC or Hostname) and perhaps configured the BDP/Airplay device to use a static ip address within the DHCP range? This would be a huge No-No!!! Perhaps this is conflicting with your airplay device? Review the settings on all the devices and make sure there's no conflicting settings with static IP assignments. Keep your auto-assigned DHCP IP addresses separate from devices that are statically configured (i.e. DHCP disabled).