Just to bring the discussion back to its original topic, I see and know already that audio over 802.11 is always thought of as a geek thing when not an insanity, but at my institution we felt this as good challenge for engineering research and I've been working on that as part of my PhD studies in the last two years. Updates and material about the project are reported at our research group webpage http://a3lab.dii.univpm.it/research/wemust
The project, called WeMUST, i.e. wireless music studio, was started to test current network technologies in a *studio*, but later we also addressed live stage usage and a concert was performed last summer on the sea. In that case we acquired signal with Debian-based ARM platforms (beagleboard xm) and sent it to special devices from Mikrotik through Ethernet. The Mikrotik devices have directional antennas and created 802.11a bridges from sea to land. The networking topology allowed for monitoring and the round-trip latency allowed by the system was 16ms at lowest (but could be reduced with a different HW choice). The musicians could synchronize well and all had the same latency, imposed by JACK, running on both the ARM and the PC mixing the signal on the land.
To recap, my opinion is that 802.11 can be as good as any other wireless technology in providing music and compared to legacy analog techniques the quality is not compromised (unless the link is so bad that connection breaks/packets get lost). Of course the 802.11 family of protocols is mainly targeted at throughput and best effort delivery, this is why the audio community must demand for amendments that allow a robust audio link, instead of neglecting the opportunity and relegating wireless connectivity to a marketing feature (as it is up to know, just a gimmick for product brochures to boost sales, showing ultra-cool ipad apps for remote control and nothing more).
With this I don't mean saying that we should replace affordable and reliable audio cables with ultra-expensive wireless stuff. My goal, as a researcher is to thrive into the technical and usability challenges of a technology so widespread nowadays, show what can be done and check from the industry or the potential users if there are new applications that are opened by wireless and most importantly networking.
Networking is a key aspect, indeed, because a point-to-point link is not novel, but if wireless connectivity can provide integration of functionalities and devices at low extra cost, it is worth investigating, IMO, at least at the academic level.