The next two benchmark runs took place inside my home theater. This is a room-within-a-room design, with four walls of 2-by-4 framing and drywall inside four walls of 2-by-6 framing and drywall, with about 6 inches of dead air and fiberglass insulation separating them. My intent was to optimize the room's acoustics, not to build a , but many lesser routers and other wireless devices have had trouble penetrating it. However, none of the 802.11ac routers I tested had any difficulty reaching the client in this room, and the DIR-685L's performance was about on a par with the two generally faster Asus and Netgear 802.11ac routers.
Since many people will want to connect the gear in their home entertainment system to an 802.11ac network, I decided to measure TCP throughput with the wireless bridge inside the built-in equipment cabinet in my home theater (the floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall cabinet is constructed from cabinet-grade plywood, including the back). The DIR-685L's TCP throughput dropped by just 29 mbps in this scenario, and its bit rate of 161 mbps per second gave it a second-place finish. I was able to wirelessly mount and stream a Blu-ray ISO image of the movie Spiderman 3 from a Windows Home Server 2011 machine in my home office to a home-theater PC in the entertainment center, including the movie's high-definition multi-channel soundtrack.
The DIR-685L's performance rebounded when I moved the client and the media bridge to the first of my two outdoor test locations--an exterior patio enclosed by three walls and one half wall with glass windows. The signal from the router travels a more direct path to this location, even though it must pass through two insulated walls. In the real world, I doubt that anyone would try to set up a media bridge outdoors because dragging the bridge and finding an outlet (and likely an extension cord) are too inconvenient. But I wanted to see what kind of range the D-Link would deliver.
The DIR-685L's performance really surprised me when I moved the client and bridge out to a picnic table completely outside my house. At this location, the router and client were 75 feet apart, separated by three insulated interior walls and one insulated exterior wall clad on one side with fiber-cement lapboard. Under these conditions, the reference 5GHz 802.11n router delivered TCP throughput of just 30.2 mpbs, but the D-Link achieved a whopping 152 mbps--the best performance of the five 802.11ac routers I tested.