Internal DAC

[David A]

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Air is TIDAL's desktop (web) player to Devialet's AIR interface on your Win or Mac? Mac with both Wireless & Over LAN.
Ethernet or WiFi?
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You say your Mac is connected to your network over both wireless and LAN. LAN is your network, the acronym means "Local Area Network". You can connect to your LAN via wifi or via ethernet. What counts in this case is how you connect your Devialet to the network and you can connect it via wifi, via ethernet or you can connect via both. If you connect by both you have to choose which connection is being used and you do that when you choose the input. You do that by selecting the wifi or ethernet output. The Devialet will actually be union only one of those inputs at any time and it's the input which is being used which is important.

The question really is which input on your Devialet is active when you use AIR, the wifi input or the ethernet input? That can make a difference depending on the quality of the wifi connection. A wired connection (ethernet) is usually considered superior to wifi.

Things can get complicated, however. I used to use ethernet from my Mac to my router, then wifi from the router to a wifi satellite unit near my Devialet, and then ethernet from the satellite unit to the Devialet so I used the ethernet input on the Devialet but in essence I was relying on the wifi connection from router to satellite unit. I had to go that way because I could not get a reliable wifi connection between my router and the Devialet and the satellite unit gave a far superior wifi connection than the Devialet could achieve. Getting a wired connection installed from the router all the way to the Devialet made a noticeable improvement because I no longer had to rely on wifi anywhere in the signal path.

I don't know how the signal is travelling over your network between your router and the Devialet but every step in that signal path is important. Even if you're using the Devialet's ethernet input as I was when I was connecting the Devialet to the satellite unit, your connection quality is going to be limited by the quality of any wifi section of the signal path because the quality of the wifi signal is affected by distance and intervening walls and floors the signal has to pass through along the way. Wired connections are far less affected by distance and aren't affected by walls and floors.