Bridge Device/Music Storage

yeah.. through put speed is important too.

Another media player can halt those drop outs... check out the free J River Jukebox audio media player. In it's tool section, you can adjust the buffer and overcome your issues I suspect... well, it's free anyways, so why not try it?

I don't know of a better "bridge" either and would suggest you consider a wired approach....assuming you haven't already done so. It seems as if you have a pretty good DAC and a wired solution could very well improve sound quality quite a bit. According to some, airport express in particular does not sound as good as a wired approach.

I stream music from a macbook to a few different airport expresses in the home and have very rarely ever noticed any dropouts. In fact it is extremely stable, so I wondering if your airport equipment is older. Does your router use 802.11g or n? If it is a or b, that may be the problem.

if you are using a MAC I've no clue...

On PC....

Perhaps more RAM would help.

I found with other media players that allow for changes in the buffering of tracks or streams, this drop out issue is vanquished.

With itunes it seems unavoidable on the windows platform, although my Vista laptop does better than xp & XP Pro desktops. The desktops have 1.25Gig and 2.0 gig or DDR RAM and the lap has 3gig.

Reducing the other apps running in the background helps too. So does use of the mini player option.