Audirvana streaming wireless seems to sound better than UPnP wired and I don't know why!

I just got Audirvana for Windows recently and I mainly use it to stream music from my computer at work to my portable rig (USB -> Chord Hugo 1 + Shure SE846). 

 

My existing setup indoors is Assert UPnP + Bubble UPnP server on my NAS (Bubble proxies the Asset + Qobuz and transcodes to wav), streaming to my 272. The 272 is connected via wired ethernet and a dedicated router to the NAS. I use Kazoo on my home laptop to as a control point. As far as I have read on here, this is reasonable practice.

 

I put Audirvana on my home laptop and I thought I would try testing it on the indoors setup. Audirvana acts as a music server + control point, so as far as I can make out, it needs to get the music from the server to my laptop where it is installed, and then stream it to the renderer. I got it to find my 272 streamer as a renderer, and I mounted a disk from my NAS over the wireless network to my laptop serve as the music library. 

 

When I pressed play, I was astonished to find out that the Audirvarna setup sounds better than the existing setup! The music through Audirvana seems to have more "life". I am wondering if I am imagining it, but I don't think so after a couple of nights.

 

To my mind, even with whatever optimisations Audivarna has, the path from disk to playout is much more difficult using the Audivarna setup: the stream has to travel over the wireless network from the NAS to my laptop to be served from there, then back to the router and down to the 272 for playout. This is also FLACs rather than WAVs that come out of the Bubble server. 

 

For the record, I am not affiliated with Audivarna, and I am not trying to promote it, neither am I trying to knock it. The same applies to Asset + Bubble UPnP. I just want to understand why a setup all over wired ethernet gets its backside kicked by wireless + a windows laptop! Have I made a mistake in the Asset + Bubble setup? Am I wrong about the audio stream needing to do via the laptop from the NAS to the 272? Could it go direct over the ethernet connection?

 

I am not complaining, just baffled! Any thoughts?