Apparently networks are very noisy and this affects audio performance, you don’t hear it as noise, but it does degrade the quality
Digital is usually perfect! It's just numbers (ones and zeros). There is no 1/2 or 1-1/2, and as long as a 1 doesn't get "flipped" to a 0 or 0 "flipped to a 1, it's perfect.
* This is the magic of digital!
If the noise is bad enough the data can be corrupted, or more frequently delayed, since there is error detection and correction.
Noise doesn't come directly-through into the analog but data corruption can cause dropouts/gaps and if they are short-duration they can sound like clicks & pops (noise). You don't get a loss of 'bass" or a loss of "detail" or better/worse soundstage, or anything like that.
It rarely happens and when it happens it's rarely subtle. One of my analogies is that one wrong bit in your bank account is equally likely to cause a 1-cent error or a billion dollar error. Amir made a
video that includes some discussion of this.
I’ve just been on another forum and it seems there is some sort of network switch that plugs in and eliminates any noise on your network.
All hubs and switches have active circuitry that buffers or "cleans up" the signal. It's an easy thing that happens automatically in almost all digital circuits. Another analogy - These posts go all over the world through multiple wired & wireless connections and if there's a typo here in my post you can be darn-sure that it was my error and not data corruption.
* I sometimes work with a particular microcontroller. It uses 5 Volt logic which means that 5V is digital one and 0V is digital zero. BUT like all digital, these analog voltages do NOT have to be perfect for the digital data to remain perfect. Anything over 3.5V is a one and anything less than 1.5V is a zero. Anything in-between is undefined and can be read as a one or a zero. That would be a BIG problem but in a properly designed circuit it just doesn't happen!
