The detrimental effect of wi-fi on SQ

Well everything has changed, my friend says probably capacitor burn in, I think I'm up to about the 200 hour mark.

I can confidently say it's now sounding better than my Meridian 507 and the effect of wi-fi has disappeared. The Rega blurb makes a big thing about it being isolated from the 'noise' of the computer, I can only guess this ability is somehow compromised until the unit has 'settled down'.

To think I nearly sent it back before the 30 days had expired and now I'm a happy man (as I don't have to stand up).

Having all your music in one place and being able to scroll through it has opened up my collection, I've been playing things I'd totally forgotten

 

I forgot to say my friend brought round the usb lead and it definitely makes an improvement, Audioquest Coffee, for free, apparently I gave him a pair of ARC 101 speakers eons ago.

 

What HiFi has a review of the Rega DAC R where they mention that the USB input on the DAC isn't as good as the other inputs.

If that's true you might want to try a Schiit Eitr USB to coax SPDIF converter to see if that gets you better sound with the USB. The Eitr is a better USB interface than is built into most DACs. Better USB isolation and clocking and stuff. But wait till your DAC burns in and the sound quality becomes constant. Then try the Eitr and see if you get some improvement.

 

Cheers for that, I had seen the What Hi-Fi review, although their opinion differs from other reviews but the Schiit looks interesting if the itch returns.

 

I'm sorry, but as I read this thread, there seem to be several issues that are being conflated: one is the effect of all the various signals, including wi-fi 'in the air' on the quality of sound even if it has nothing to do with signal transmission (e.g., running a turntable and no digital whatsoever but in an environment rife with electronic signals) and another is quality of signal transmission via wireless v hard wired connection, leaving aside for the moment what connector is used.
I suspect one could hear via an audio system the effects of stray electronic signals in the environment depending on location, shielding and the like. When I lived in New York (out of town, but still dense), there were lots of stray noises my system could pick up; i think part of it was noise on the power grid and how the power cables were brought up into the room via dedicated lines which were not optimized. There's all kinds of electronic junk in our 'atmosphere'- to the point where if you were a stone crazy purist, you'd probably want to be in a Faraday cage.
I have a commercial quality wi-fi antenna downstairs that feeds the whole house, rather than running off the little antenna that comes in the Google Fiber black box. It is sufficient to give me whole house coverage upstairs (it's a relatively small house, so I don't need different zones or extenders). I don't shut it off because I often use a laptop while upstairs listening. I haven't noticed a degradation in signal quality due to the presence of such signals but I often wonder what their effect is on our health. Telephone transmission signals, the introduction of 5G (some controversy on that), etc.
Remote controls typically use infra-red and have been around for years. Some devices talk to one another through Bluetooth. There's wi-fi, and telephone signals, leaving aside all the other electronic signals that are part of our noisy electronic environment. I would think the impact of this on signal quality would vary considerably depending on location, shielding and perhaps sensitivity of some of the equipment and even the power cables in the wall to these extraneous signals.
I'm not addressing passing music or video information via wi-fi. (I use hard wired connections for that, largely because of the potential for small, but significant drop-out, something I experienced even with hard wired ethernet in the early days of broadband Internet, trying to stream what were at the time hi-rez movies- the tests from the streaming service looking down the pipe showed that I had very good bandwidth, far more than was necessary, but there would be an occasional drop out for very short periods of time, enough to send the receiving device into a buffering tailspin and the stream would lock up). Changing from a cable based Internet provider (this was the dark days of Internet) to a fiber based supplier (FIOS) solved most of those problems. But I still use hard wired connections within the home for any audiovisual device, other than my laptop(s).