Just a few general points:
When it comes to networking, some may claim that fibre optic is superior, others may support direct ethernet wiring and yet others are proponents of WiFi.
In truth, all are capable of providing adequate performance and all can provide SoTA performance WHEN fully optimized. Given that non will provide their best possible performance without being optimized, the first question is; are you perfectly happy with ‘adequate sound quality’ and would you like to keep your system as simple and cheap as possible? If the answer is “yes” then either simple, uncomplicated ethernet or wi-fi will suffice. Just don’t expect anything like the best performance your system could provide. In the analog field, that would be akin to buying a $300 turntable and expecting £30,000 performance. Just isn’t going to happen.
Generally speaking, networking products and standards were never developed with music reproduction in mind, so it would be the rare network engineer who is familiar with the sonic results of any type of network. For them, the concept of ‘bit perfect’ is as far as networking needs to go and as long as you have the same bit pattern at the end as at the beginning, you’re golden.
But if you’re not satisfied with mediocre sonic performance and really want to know something about how networking can be optimised to get the best sonics, you probably need to talk to the few DIY Audiophile IT specialists who post details of their work and experiments and to companies developing S0TA equipment for digital streaming….companies like Taiko Audio, Innuos, Pink Faun etc.
When you do that, you find that there is a substantial amount of research going on, but all with the purpose of developing the best DIY or commercial products (I am really not aware of any academic research into digital streaming……I imagine getting appropriate funding levels could be difficult).
What you will find is that the people mentioned above understand the impact of all kinds of network related digital issues, conditions, faults, set points etc. on the resulting sonics of computer based hifi.
To give you some examples:
Power supply ripple
Power supply impedance
Network traffic
Ground plane noise
Error handling
Bandwidth
Bios settings
Operating systems
Push vs pull comms
Interfaces
CPU activity and interrupts
Power supply topology
Buffer sizes
Switch noise
Galvanic Isolation
Hardware layout
Bandwidth
File format
Software
Filters
Memory devices
EMI production and control
RFI control
Clock stability and jitter
Cables
Vibration and resonance control
Board layout
Etc. etc.
Some of their findings will surprise you, for example that your streaming set up can influence the sound quality of your analog music reproduction.