Router for Audio Streaming

Epilogue:

Hi guys,

Well, I broke down under the overwhelming peer pressure and succumbed to the ethernet gospel.  Did exactly as @nagel suggested -- got a high rated 30' CAT 6 cable off Amazon and ran it along the floor, from the router to the streamer.

My wife and I decided to evaluate it completely blind.

Our listening space is our living room, and the component rack is behind a wall in the study.
My wife has a very refined musical ear and sharper hearing than mine, and like me has been into music and good audio for decades, so she was the evaluator.
I proceeded to unplug and plug (or not...) the ethernet cable from/into the streamer and replay each track at least 3 times in quick succession with blind changes in between (and at times no changes for verification).  We did not touch the volume or any other controls throughout the evaluation. I had my router admin page open on my computer in the study to confirm each time after plugging in that the connection indeed switched from wifi back to wired.
My wife could not see what I was doing and I never told her.  She remained seated in the optimal listening spot in the living room.
I marked the track, setting (wired or wifi) and her feedback on a sheet in the study.
We repeated this for four hi-res Qobuz tracks which we know very well and which cover the important audio aspects - human voice, orchestra, harmonics, percussion, bass, sound stage, dynamic range, etc.

The outcome:  Nothing.  She could not tell any difference after any change with any track.  I 100% agreed with her assessment but we did not communicate during the evaluation and I recused myself since my experience was not blind.

Disclaimer:  We have very few devices sharing 2.4 GHz bandwidth with the streamer, we do not live in a high density area, and our internet download speed is consistently around 350 mbps or better, so our wifi traffic is not challenged. Hence, "your results may vary"... although I have serious doubts.

In closing, no one so far has been able to provide me with a clear logical explanation for a potential mechanism which alters bits in wifi in a manner which results in stuff like less rich tonality, narrower sound stage, reduced frequency response, increased noise floor and all the rest of it compared to Ethernet.  (I am not arguing about drops and buffering if your wifi is too crowded, but these are discrete events, not a continuous effect on sound quality.)

Many thanks to y'all for making this a very lively and informative thread!

Cheers.

@yoramguy1

Cool. That was great of you to spend the time to do that! Excellent data point. My partner has better hearing than I, although she cannot describe differences. She can very much hear minute differences.

Running cable in my house would be a big thing, which I have resisted… for about 20 years. So I have had to accept that my streaming sounding as good as my vinyl was indirect evidence of my Netgear Router / extender / streamer made up for direct cabling.

@ghdprentice , thanks!

I actually got sucked now (really for no good reason!) into "hardwiring" the ethernet cable through the crawl space.  Quite a PITA fishing it through 3 different places, but I figured I already have the cable, have the time, and have the poor judgment (and twisted urge?) to proceed with the challenge....

We may be hearing very slight improvement with our turntable, but definitely none with our Sony ES SACD player over wifi.

Like you, I resisted this, for 10 years in our case ever since we moved here.  Again, we have never had an issue or the need to do this.  Needless to say, I am not proceeding to invest in an audiophile grade switch...  :-)

Cheers!

Factual correction for the record (not that it affected the outcome):  The CAT 6 cable we used in the evaluation and I subsequently hardwired is 50' long, not 30' (got it mixed up with my bass guitar cable).

@yoramguy1 Ethernet has lower latency vs wifi, low latency good for jitter. Weakness of your setup is long ethernet cable, not good for latency. I've found both length and quality of ethernet cable matters, to the point I relocated my router very close to my system.