Do router and ethernet cables affect sound quality?

Well, if you read what I said, you will see that its not that easy. You need the complete signal from the last silence to the next silence, so you would have to cache the data and replay it which makes it a little impractical. Also, I don’t know how easy/hard it would be for a DAC to generate this signal even if it had all data it required. But its well suited for pre-calculating and using it as a “perfect” signal and compare it to the output of a DAC.

With a complete measurement like this on real music, it would not be hard to create a “transparency index” which basically tells how close the DAC output is to the original signal. And that would be a very meaningful number to use to compare DACs (can also be used for other HiFi equipment with some modifications).