Sending music to DAC wireless vs wired

My house has thick plaster interior walls and poor wireless propagation. But I have a full basement with mostly open joists. So I move audio (and other data) around my house via wired ethernet.

But I always assumed that ethernet was intrinsically better than wireless for audio anyway. Is this not the case?

JPO

I thought the same, and have read it somewhere as well. Anyone do an AB test on wired vs wireless with the squeezebox? I have a long enough ethernet cable that I can try, just didn't get around to it yet. (I don't have any dropouts, either).

That's probably not a good question to ask then if you are concerned about electrical isolation.

That depends much more on the exact DAC and interface used from media player/HTPC -> DAC.

For a simplified example, toslink automatically removed the electrical isolation issue but leaves much to desire on the jitter front. A regular BNC 75ohm coaxial cable will do much better at the jitter front but does carry the ground over. So if the DAC and media player has a good noise rejection circuit with a decent power supply, that would be prefered.

Regarding signal/noise issue on wired and wireless, any decent Cat5E ethernet cable system is great at noise rejection. Cat5E can transmitt 1gigabit/sec over 100ft easily without signal loss. That's far greater bandwidth than any DAC at 24bit/192Hz and any existing Wifi Network.

Ejliu - S/PDIF coax does not necessarily connect the two grounds. Some DAC's and reclockers have isolation transformers.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio

Did not know that isolation transformers are used in the digital input. I thought it can be used rather easily in the power supply but anyone can do that cheaply.

I figure that most of media players have rather inexpensive computer power supply so most of the ground noise is coming from the supply line instead of the nicer DAC.

Any inexpensive ones? Meaning <$1k. I figure it would rather expensive to implement a transformer for a digital signal.