Ah, right, makes sense
Regarding wifi sound degradation, the usual hypothesis is, as far as I am aware, that running the wifi within the streamer causes additional load in the streamer. IF this is a problem, it would as far as I can tell be easily solved by running an external wifi receiver and cabling it to the streamer. This would at least guarantee that there’s no electrical noise influence coming from the router or the internet
Would using an optical cable from streamer to DAC eliminate electrical noise influence coming from the router or the internet?
If I remember correctly, the guy who designed the Hugo recommends using optical.
I prefer optical into my Ndac, even though it has galvanic isolation.
I suppose so, as there would not be an electrical connection
I’m with plusnet, and I’ve never heard of that.
Do you think it makes any difference?
It’s on your account homepage called pro-add on.
Not 100% sure if it works or not… Plusnet (of course) say it does. 
Click on the “Placebo” button for high priority internet data stream. 
There must be an explanation.
You just don’t know what it is.
E.g. the explanation may be that FR is pulling your leg!
“It’s an add-on you can buy if you’ve got a residential broadband account with us (Plusnet Pro isn’t available on Business accounts). When you’ve got a busy household all online at the same time, Plusnet Pro prioritises key activities such as VPN access (ideal for working from home), software updates and FTP access so that you can get on with important work.”
I’ll admit, it doesn’t really do what I expected.
Ah - so it’s just prioritising FTP streams over less important streams into your house.
But are, say, Netflix films FTP downloads as well as Qobuz music files?
Because they are compressed 
Let’s say, as a simple, conceptual example, that there are 5 seconds of silence. In a wav file with CD quality, this is represented as actually storing 16 bits of zeros for 5 secs * 44,100 times. (This results in the same file size as when storing 5 seconds of music that is not just zeros in each sample but, say, 1011000100110001 etc)
FLAC achieves the compression by just writing down “5 seconds of zero”. But this is not music data that you can send to a DAC.
So, the FLAC needs to be decompressed, and the FLAC decompressor sees “5 seconds of zero”, so it turns that back into 5 seconds * 44,100 samples of 16 bits of zeros, and this is what is sent to the DAC
Yes. I meant technical explanation that would explain why a FLAC would sound better than the WAV that it was created from.
Plus, to be precise, I can’t think of any such technical explanation. Well, if the decompression happens within the streamer, the increased noise caused by the increased processing work might be experienced as more preferable sound, I suppose this is possible. But if the decompression does not happen within the streamer but externally, I cannot think of any explanation at all
I believe more that there may be other factors involved, but no one really knows.
As I said, I preferred WAV on my ex Unitserve. Now Flac with the Melco.
But mostly I prefer AIFF.
I am not alone, have read here , on old threads, that a few prefer FLAC, and also that some don’t hear differences. I am still referring to old streamers. Most say they prefer WAV, but there may some bias inducing, because it’s often stated that Naim recommends WAV.
Maybe @Simon-in-Suffolk will confirm. Because I know they are compressed, but however lossless. I know also that a lot configure their Servers to convert on the fly from Flac to Wav.
But I have never read that the decompression from FLAC to WAV IS AUTOMATIC.
I still think that the decompression is not automatic. But I may be proven wrong.
Unless we know exactly how the hardware and SW work we cannot know what the explanation is, if there is a technical one.
As a logical point, as the two processes are different there could be a difference in SQ, which a user prefers.
Yes, lossless. Of course. If I send you a text file that consists of 100 pages of the letter X, 1000 times per page, you can throw away my letter and just write down “100 pages, 1000 times X each page”, which obviously takes less space.
Then, if you later create a new text file with 100 pages of 1000 times X, this is lossless. If you use the same text encoding, such as ASCII, there is no difference between the two files.
And yes, the FLAC must be decompressed into music data before sending to the DAC. That’s just how it works, sorry. Either the UPnP server does it by configuring it to transcode the FLAC to WAV before sending the WAV to the streamer, or otherwise the streamer has to do it before sending the data samples to the DAC. This is precisely what was proposed as an explanation for why the transcoding to WAV by the Upnp server might be beneficial, because then the streamer does not have to do it, which lowers its processing load. This is not completely implausible if the streamer does not have much computing power, like the legacy Naim streamers. But now you seem to be saying the opposite, that using the FLAC sounds better to you
Yes, if there is, e.g., resulting processing noise that is interpreted as preferable. Because THE DATA IS THE SAME
Yes data are data.
Until the waves of electromagnetism of which they consist hit the DAC.
Yes, but that doesn’t explain why sending the FLAC to the streamer instead of the WAV would sound better in FR’s Melco example.
I mostly download bought albums in AIFF. AIFF takes even more space vs WAV, but I prefer AIFF.
Wav sound a bit flat. Flac more airy. AIFF fuller vs Flac, but not flat.
I know, there’s no logic. But I repeated the comparison on different days, different moods, with my Melco settled on Flac and on Wav.
Agreed.
That’s why I said above that there must be an explanation of why a user prefers one to the other - but we don’t know what that is.
And we probably never will.