There’s little chance to argument if someone seems to know as much as you do, but maybe Paul‘s post here helps. The option where to decompress (server or streamer) is something also Ted mentioned.
I personally don’t fully understand it and I don’t know how I can care for a decompression on the server instead of in the Bridge except when in Jriver explicitly configuring conversion of everything to wav or AIF before playing to the Bridge or another streamer (which I do not).
Assumed we would all configure conversion on the server, it would be interesting if we still hear a difference. I guess probably yes, and I also guess we’d probably hear a differemce if another noticable CPU load would be implied to the server while playing. All those theoretical thoughts just prove nothing, it’s only important what we hear…then we can try to find out why.