airport express questions

the airport express will receive any type of file that you ship it. you can use itunes or airfoil for xm/sirius radio. if you want a better connection, get a glass toslink cable. big difference over a plastic toslink. i go from the airport express or apple tv into a jitter device using glass toslink, then use a coax digital cable into an external dac.

if something starts as mp3, it will end up as mp3. the codec that the AE uses won't add bits to the file to make it anything else. thats like saying compress a picture of 3Mb over the network, then have the codec on the other end create a 12Mb picture out of it. can't happen. the AE is a fancy modem that uses a codec to transfer data from a source to a destination.

you can't add bits of information that wasn't there in the beginning. if you send 8 bits of info to an airport express, even after all of the codec manipulation, you will get 8 bits of useful information after the AE. sure you might get 24 bits after the conversion, but it will still only be 8 useful bits. for example, once you rip a cd to a low quality format, say mp3, it will always be mp3 quality, you have lost all of the info and will not get it back. sure you can convert it to acc/apll/etc..., but it will always sound like mp3, those compressed/dropped out bits are gone forever.

going to mp3, the bits are lost. compare file sizes. there is a reason why people use mp3 on ipod's because of the storage savings. also, it really doesn't matter what the AE uses to compress or manipulate the data from itunes, when it comes out of the AE, it will be the same as what it is feed.
an AE device is no different than the modems 30 years ago. the transmitting modem would send the data in a certain compressed mode (itunes on a mac) possibly with security built in, then the receiving modem (AE) would unbundle the data, strip the security bits,uncompress the data, and the remote data is byte for byte the same as the source.
this might be the only time i would agree with stereophile.
also, try xld if you are using a mac.
if you get a chance, listen to the amarra software for the itunes/mac combination. it sounded pretty good at ces.

the computer can do this and much more if you have a decent machine. when you stream your music, how much cpu are you using? are you telling me that you are maxing out your cpu? the computer has to do quite a bit of work to get data off the disk, into it's memory buffers, and then package it up to send it over the network. all of this messaging of data happens in memory, after it is read from disk. if you system is using less than 80% of your cpu, it is not a big deal. now if you are saturating the cpu, now you need to offload some processing.

jax2 - you are correct. that was point in my thread above. unless your computer is saturating the cpu, then it will have the capability to do a few more instructions to stream audio. i have 3 separate zones off my mac and it is barely doing any cpu or IO. what you will see normally is higher IO and not CPU. but again, nothing that a newer computer can't handle.