Apple Airplay Sound Quality

Sterophile had reviewed the first iteration of the AE and found its analog output to be somewhat lacking but as a transport, it achieved reasonable performance.

I am somewhat surprised to hear about the jitter issue via the optical output as mine works perfectly fine as did Stereophile's test unit.

It does play CD quality recordings without any issues but I will give a quick experiment this evening to see if it will do anything higher out of the optical output.

The results of the quick test I took was as follows.

I sent a 24/96 file via Airplay to my receiver with integrated DAC, an HK 3490. The end result was the display stated the signal was 44.1Khz PCM. I can only assume that there is some down sampling during the process, but I do not know exactly where.

I will prepare some more testing to gain more clarity on the matter but I would not be surprised if what I found was additionally confirmed.

There are two traces on that graph and one is for the analog outputs while the other is for the Musical Fidelity X-DAC V3. The only thing I am not sure is if the MF device is using something to reduce jitter. He does note that it performed better then his RME card from his computer.