DACs: Airport Express vs waveterminal vs mini-dac

Bought an AirPort Express and I will be modding it soon... I will let you all know if it is as good as the Transit on a PC.

Unfortunately I dont have a MAC laptop, and I probably will not buy one. I will look into borrowing one for this.

I live in the mountains in central Oregon. 7 miles to the nearest town of 1000.

The Edirol is probably the best choice for iMac. An AES/EBU interface can easily be added to the Edirol with mods, as well as improving its jitter performance. Just a short cable hanging from it with a XLR connector attached.

BTW - Edumke - Did you try iTunes with the Transit with an iMac?

Steve N.
Empirical Audio
Manufacturer

One thing about the Transit - I use it with Foobar player and ASIO plug-in. These are critical on a PC to get the quality out of it. I also playback exclusively with 24/96 through my DAC. This makes all the difference. Leaves all transports in the dust.

I am thinking hard about buying an Airport Express and modding it to have a S/PDIF coax out. This might be the best solution for iMac, although I prefer a wired USB connection.

Having some trouble getting my PC laptop to talk to the AirPort Express....

Looks like I will have to cut it out of the case to mod it - no fasteners.

"I tried the Transit on two separate Apple systems myself, and had several friends come to the same conclusion on different systems.
....the music sounded like it was castrated."

I heard back from M-Audio and they have verified that "in order to match levels of the MAC to PC, the MAC digital out must be set to +8."

I recently tried the comparison of MAC to PC using my Off-Ramp at CES, and initially it really sucked, but after turning off all of the DSP functions of the MAC, it got a lot better. The dynamics and loudness was lower though. I think the +8 setting explains this. M-Audio said that the driver fro the Transit for MAC is actually superior to the PC version.

Racerxnet - forget the sound card. Use an external converter with it's own power supply, or a USB DAC.

Kenn39 wrote:
I was afraid of the word "iTunes". On a WinPC, Foobar2000 gives better sound than iTunes in my opinion.

This is because iTunes on PC does not bypass Kmixer. With Foobar2000, you can usually find an ASIO plug-in that will do this.

Again, I don't know much about the Macs. To be safe, you may want to find out how to get bit-perfect digital stream from a Mac before proceeding.

iTunes on MAC is perfectly fine. Bit-perfect. You can even upsample.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio
Manufacturer/modder