I never said data bits will be corupted with the noise. When a wire carries a signal it also transmits electrical noise. Do you think it delivers corupted data? No it does not, you are right. But with the data it also introduces emi noise and the signal that passes the data carries the noise.
Similarly the radio wave that carries data packets in a wireless connection also carries noise from router and other rfi sources.Then the whole signal gets to the wireless module of the streamer and enters it. That radio signal has both data packets and the transmitted noise and it does not have to alter the data itself.it can not.
Then the device's input signal filters do their job and the better device it is, the more it cleans the signal and process it further.
Tell me if I am wrong.
Do you have a basic understanding of electrical circuit theory?
If so, you should be able to follow this.
In the network segment using line or RF, if the noise is so high so that SNR is low, data is not received correctly by the application.
So these segments are designed to have an acceptable SNR. No circuit element is cleaning the signal, it just retrieves it for further processing.
In this case, store into a buffer for playback. If it can't retrieve it there will be an application error.
The processor that's running the streaming protocols is also hosting the player which in turn puts it out on I2S or USB or Coax or OPT using relevant circuitry. In practice the noise introduced by a processor, RPi or fancy stuff, is much higher than network side line/RF noise.
Circuits are usually isolated from each other using good design practices such as proper ground plane design, trace shielding, etc.
Once the audio signal, processed by the player and transported (in sequence) over the transport interface, DAC kicks in.
In this segment there can be issues, if SNR is not good or you have a lousy cable or a SBC.
Correlating noise over the network to unacceptable SNR in audio path is .... a huge leap of faith, which many folks take with out understanding.
So they start changing routers, ethernet cables and what not. All I'm saying here is, the network segment is not the culprit here for poor sounding audio. It can be the player SW, the way I2S is laid out on the board, or USB implementation or something else.
Not the network segment, which is what the original post asks.
Do router and ethernet cables affect sound quality?
The answer still stays true to what I said many posts earlier.
No, it does not.
Cheers,
Raghu