With the exception of USB and Ethernet, all other commonly used digital audio interfaces (spdif, toslink, AES3, i2s) are synchronous. This means that the source (the network player in your case) controls the clock.
Some DACs will buffer and reclock even these synchronous interfaces, but it's still important to have an accurate and clean source clock to reduce buffer under/overflows and noise.
Many DACs sound better using one of these synchronous interfaces. For example, my Denafrips Terminator Plus sounds noticably better using i2s than any of the other inputs I've tried including USB.