Apple Airport Express Very Cool Product

Budrew.

I am running mine via the toslink cable...from the $39 cable pack you need to buy ;( directly to the digital in on a receiver in my bedroom, and it works well, I've not done any critiacl listening to really establish HOW good it is, but from what I gather, it is giving a digital feed, so I don't see why you couldn't use it directly to a DAC as well, sincce this is basically what I'm doing with it, only using the DAC in the receiver.

I hope they get the software to the point that I can run several with different feeds, or at least feed something to multiple units simultaneously.

I'm running the optical feed into my MF Trivista CD/SACD player/DAC and using Apple Loseless importing, I can't tell a difference between iTunes music played over the Airport Express and the original CD (tentative finding, more listening sessions needed). I'm wondering if the miniplug-to-optical cable in the stereo kit for the AE would also work with the iPod. Anyone try this?

ive read on the ipodlounge that they miniplug/optical cable doesnt work with the ipod. though I bet apple includes that feature in the 5th gen ipod and possibly the 2nd gen ipod mini (im buying one as soon as the feature is added) they have included this minijack and digital connector on there new imac so i bet youll be seeing it on everything apple in the future.

sound quality when using the optical is very good but the only grip that I have is itunes doesnt do gapless play so there is a 1-2 second gap between each song also if you listen with headpones you can hear a small pop in between each song. both are probably easily fixed in the next version of itunes though and from what ive read on the itunes forum on apples website it seems to be a pretty popular requested feature for true gapless play.

Does anyone know the digital output capability of Airport Express. My Sony DVD Player puts out (24bit/96kHz) through its toslink cable. What is the rated digital output bitrate and frequency range of AX?

The optical digital output can be modified to be a S/PDIF coax output fairly easily. Same modification that I do on the M-Audio Transit to change from toslink to coax.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio
Manufacturer