I was interested enough in this whole topic to buy an Airport Express and check into it for myself. I followed some of the info on Audioengr's website and used the Exact Audio Copy software for ripping CD's uncompressed to my PC HD (Compaq tower, fairly new). I bought a compatible USB wireless device and also the little Apple remote that plugs into the AE USB port.
I use the Monster mini to Toslink cable and run that into my Audio Alchemy DTi Pro32, where I messed briefly with increasing the word length from 16, 18, 20, 22 up to 24 bit. The DTi then goes into an MF A3 24 Dac which upsamples to 192khz.
We had a club meeting on Sunday at my place, so we spent a little time comparing the PC playback with playback through my transport.
The main drawback with the PC front end is on busier passages where the music seems to collapse a little (compress). In most cases it comes fairly close to the sound quality attained via the transport, but has never sounded better, only similar or slightly inferior.
I wonder if there are improvements to be had at the copy stage, perhaps some of the many parameters in the EAC software need to be set differently?
Has anyone using a good transport had better results with the AE and a Mac or PC server?
I'd be interested to hear if it's possible to improve the performance using the hardware that I have.
Cheers
I use the Monster mini to Toslink cable and run that into my Audio Alchemy DTi Pro32, where I messed briefly with increasing the word length from 16, 18, 20, 22 up to 24 bit. The DTi then goes into an MF A3 24 Dac which upsamples to 192khz.
We had a club meeting on Sunday at my place, so we spent a little time comparing the PC playback with playback through my transport.
The main drawback with the PC front end is on busier passages where the music seems to collapse a little (compress). In most cases it comes fairly close to the sound quality attained via the transport, but has never sounded better, only similar or slightly inferior.
I wonder if there are improvements to be had at the copy stage, perhaps some of the many parameters in the EAC software need to be set differently?
Has anyone using a good transport had better results with the AE and a Mac or PC server?
I'd be interested to hear if it's possible to improve the performance using the hardware that I have.
Cheers