Hello everyone,
I just discovered the wonders of trying to have the best digital signal possible on my setup.
I have a NAS at home with roon server installed, a 3dlab streamer that is roon compatible (RAAT), and the rega Elicit on top of that.
My problem is : I can’t wired directly the streamer to my router, so i used CPL (through the electric wire, i’m not sure it’s the right name for this, it is in french). But i just open the can of worms that the signal can have jitter and all that !! I was really surprised because in my mind, a digital signal could not be “badly” received, it was 1 or 0…
I read it everywhere so that’s a fact but sometimes there’s still 1% in me believing this is a marketing thing to be honest. I tested “geforce now”, (a cloud gaming service), which renders a 4K video and high quality sound without a glitch through the internet, and not a packet loss during multiple hours of gameplay (you can see it on the console and my connection was topping 500mb/s sometimes), so telling me that some bit can be lost or time inaccurate in the 2m ethernet cable at home, so that some streamers without DAC cost 10K is still a bit hard for me to accept but WHATEVER that is not the point.
So back to my question if we accept that it can affect the sound : will the CPL might have a negative impact on my streamer performance ?
From the Networking Best Practices article:
The quality of Ethernet Over Power solutions varies quite a bit, and generally it will be less reliable than Ethernet. There are times it can work well, but if you’re having a problem and powerline ethernet is involved, we recommend temporarily replacing the ethernet over power connection with a real ethernet cable to see if things improve.
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If you mean using power lines for transporting network data, depending on your environment, and specific product you use, it may or may not be better than WiFi. With a good propduct it well might be better (although depends on your internal wiring quite a bit).
However, TCP/IP (what RAAT uses to move data to endpoints) is an asynchronous packetized protocol. 1) there is no jitter in any audiophile sense (like there would be if you were using S/PDIF or I2S to move same data), and 2) even if there were bits lost in a 2M cable (it’s… possible, but losing one bit in a year isn’t really something to worry about) the bad packet will be retransmitted until it arrives in one piece.
So, “if we accept that it can affect the sound” then you might as well accept anything, and paint your walls electric orange. Will have just as much effect as anything else 
If the powerline adapter you are using does not quite agree with your power lines, you might get dropouts, intermittent playback, or RAAT might give up altogether, but there will be no jitter and no sound difference while it is playing.
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