Wifi vs hardwired for streaming

I just went down the very same rabbit hole so can give you my experience as another option to consider.

TL;DR 

I switched from a WiFi mesh (two asus routers) to wired using two Netgear Powerline 1000 (1gb speeds). The key benefit is a faster response between the streamer in the living room and the LMS server in the garage.

making the necessary wiring connections is just too expensive, time consuming, messy, and very much a Rube Goldberg solution for the basic need of having 1s and 0s transported down thick copper wire.
 

how’s the sound you may ask? My placebo-biased perception is that it improves the sound (fuller, more rounded) but measurements may burst my bubble.

like I said for me it was about having a quick responsive connection and eliminating the occasional dropout. Mission accomplished pretty easily, cheaply, and quickly.

I moved in early 2025. In my old home I ran a ethernet connection to my Auralic Aries G1, however, in my new home I decided to try WiFi, and I find the WiFi, in my application and with my gear, is the better set up. I have a Node in a 2nd system and that has always been via Wif=Fi and the results are excellent as well. 

I have three access points directly wired. One on each floor. I set the RSSi to 15dBi so it’s not blasting the power and I set to 5Ghz only and VHT40. 

All TP-Link with their Omada Controller. 802.11 k/v/r enabled. So I can roam easily with devices and they just had off from AP to AP. 

I’m getting 70MB/s. Did a play list of almost 300GB and when I looked at my Zabbix monitoring I had only 4 resend and zero drops from the source IP of my NAS. 

While wired Ethernet is certainly going to be the most fool proof I’ve 14 wireless clients and even if I loose an AP the other two can ramp up from 15 to 21 or even higher dBi and self heal. 

There are benefits to wifi that Ethernet is much more expensive and you would have to physcially change wall jacks to achieve. 

I think for the topic of WiFi there should be a distinction as to where the WiFi is received, either before the streamer or in the streamer.  Keeping WiFi and its RFI noise out of the streamer box seems important to me.  Once it's inside the streamer there is no way to manage it.

Minimizing Ethernet cable lengths and using filters manages the EMI RFI antenna of cable.  Using Fiber will also manage this and Common Mode noise.  

I have excellent results from an EERO Max7 > SOtM filtered Ethernet cable > Sonore OpticalModule (Uptone JS4) > NA Tempus > NA Muon Pro Streaming System > Innuos streamer.  The nasty SMPS for the EERO is on a power conditioner that is on two Isolation Transformers and all are powered by a PS Powerplant P10.  (I have experienced SMPS's directly connected to the P10 corrupting the sound of other gear.)

I have considered moving the EERO closer to the streamer for direct Ethernet but I am concerned the Ethernet signal from the EERO is being polluted by the WIFI noise generated in the router, as well as the other electrical noise created in the busy router, and feel isolating the streamer from this noise with the filters and fiber makes sense.