As someome pointed out, even 99% packet loss on a modern network wont affect the stream. I've actually seen (unfortunely) 100mbit "working" with cat3 (phone) ribbon cable... For short distances (<10m), it wont even reach 10% packet loss.
And players buffer. Always.
For lossless CD-quality audio you need about 160kbyte/s.
So on a gigabit network (125Mbyte/s), you'd need over 99.999% packet loss in order to not keep up.
So they're comparing to an almost completely faulty cable.
I feel like a lot of audiophile stupidity is not understanding scale.
There is a difference between the fancy speaker cables and acceptable cheap ones, but it's so ridiculously minuscule as to be completely inaudible compared to, say, whether or not the listener is wearing socks or not.
And that's not an exaggeration, that difference will literally be more than the difference in cables, probably by an order of magnitude.
The only real difference between the cables will be at frequencies over, say, a GHz. ie RF frequencies 50x higher than cats might be able to hear.
But the audiofool will say, "see, there's a difference - I want my system to sound the best".
And they focus so much on ridiculously overkill cables, amplifiers and stupid stands, yet seem to often ignore room treatment which could really make a difference. It's often massive speakers in horribly reflective minimalistic rooms, driven by amps running at 0.1% of their power rating.
Another thing is not understanding tradeoffs. Everything is a compromise, so when you buy the amp that's rated at 2000W but only run it at 2W, it won't measure as well as the same quality amp that's rated at 50W, also running at 2W.
Similarly a speaker with a max rating of 500W running at 2W won't be as accurate as a speaker with a max rating of 50W running at 2W, because physically the material the speaker is made out of has to be more resilient/less flexible to handle that kind of maximum power.
But they focus on one particular thing (usually the expensive thing) to the detriment of other things.
Also not understanding wattage.
Because sound is logarithmic, it is really eye-opening how little power you need for quite loud audio. Most systems you wouldn't want to listen to at over 5W.
Eg for, say two Kef R7 speakers which have a sensitivity of 88dB, at only 5W, from 3m away is 94.4dB.
You don't need a 5000W amp. But they don't understand any of this so they just think higher number and more expensive equals better.
It's like buying a Mack truck because you heard it carries more than a hatchback when you're going to the supermarket, and thinking it must be better because it's more expensive.
