Router for Audio Streaming

This is a couple years old but it may help.

@jerryg123 , thank you. That's a pretty good article.  What I'm missing is an explanation exactly how the power supply and switching affects the audio stream sound quality in the digital stage (switch and streamer).  What is the mechanism.  The signal is still bits, so what happens to them, and what control or error checking, if any, is occurring in this stage.  Anyway thanks again.

Let us know what you try and how it works. Get the latest spec’d wifi and avoid mesh if possible. It’s just wireless feeding wireless so it would be worse. The client side will need to be upgraded if it doesn’t support the latest wifi. Keep in mind that you don’t need to have your wifi AP located where the router is. Buy another AP and locate it as close to your system as you can, You’ll need a wired connection or you’re back to using mesh. All things are possible if you want them badly enough. You might buy or borrow a long ethernet patch cable and run it along the floor just to see what you’re missing. +1 etherregen and +1 to teknorob23’s setup, but I can clearly hear things upstream. I don’t have clock for the ER yet but that is planned.

As to why it works, it must be noise and jitter and multiple types of each.

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.