I started fooling around with Chrome cast puck and my UCX in home studio.. Chrome cast is connected to UCX with optical spdif.

Seems that it can send bit perfect stream 44.1 kHz/16 from tidal to RME using Chrome browser in mac, which is nice. However this only applies if RME is set for external clock, so the question is if I am compromising DA quality of the RME if I use presumably not very good clock of the chrome cast audio (clock source set to optical in)? Or is this just what Steady clock is about, meaning it makes sure that bad external clock does not affect DA performance. Or is it totally the opposite?

Recordings with clock set to optical in pass the null test, but recordings with clock set to internal don't, the sum has bursts of audio at even intervals and then again zero for some time.

I have 10-15 years of experience in RME gear in professional environment but this got me puzzled. I'm only using tidal as a test media here because it can send audio to chrome cast easily, if the testing will prove that this is a good way to send lossless audio via wifi it would be great to find a way to stream workstation audio etc.. Already tried software called Airfoil for mac os which worked but had issues.

Also noticed that Tidal web interface with Chrome has weird 24 bit audio stream (although it lacks the masters option of actual 24 bit streams), same songs in desktop app are true 16 bit when (checked with Bitter vst, that shows the bit depth of audio)..

Sorry for this somewhat off topic post, the RME part is probably mostly about understanding Steadyclock and how and when i should use external or internal clock. In the studio we have ad/da converters slaved to UFX, never had issues or sound quality problems, but also never really bothered to look for them..

Thanks in advance for all the input!