What you are saying is that MUSIC DATA is special.
No, I am NOT. The data (the purely digital bit stream) is treated identically, regardless of the media being transported.
The bits are not the problem; provided your link isn't so bad that unrecoverable errors occur, the received data stream is identical to the transmitted data stream.
So, we recover the perfect digital bitstream from the bearer medium at the receiver, and use a DAC to convert to the desired analogue music signal.
The problem comes due to the fact that those bits carried over the bearer medium have an analogue representation (of the bit, or data symbol); a real, physical signal. That signal can carry extraneous analogue noise, as well as the noise inherent in the fast edges of our digital data stream (Fourier series).
Unfortunately, if we don't take care, the bearer noise signals can couple into the analogue side of our DAC, both those extraneous noise signals, and the digital edge noise. This is what we must try to eliminate when designing an interface and the DAC, and there are a number of techniques to do this.
These techniques involve the transmitter (the interface data driver, its power supply, the line impedance control/filtering), the cable (preferably a good, impedance controlled, shielded cable), the receiver (again, power supply, input impedance matching, receiver buffer, filtering), and in subsequent processing stages, using isolation of the receiver from the digital processing, then isolation of the digital processing from the DAC digital input, and an isolation barrier across the DAC, which provides the digital/analogue barrier. Get these isolation barriers right, and you should kill any input coupling to such an extent that it becomes inaudible.
Then there's time domain noise to consider, especially if the DAC is data source clocked... That's why a destination-clocked system is best (e.g the 'asynchronous' USB transfer mode); the clock can be propagate back from the DAC, to all the isolation reclocking stages. Using a FIFO buffer, we can isolate the DAC output sample timing from the source data supply.
Source-clocked transfer mechanisms require the DAC to be driven by a clock recovered from the data stream. Recovered clocks are harder to produce with low jitter than those generated by an independent clock. Jitter (time domain noise) causes audible effects in the DAC output. Like 'grittiness'.