Apple Airport Express Very Cool Product

"Is this modification necessary to go from Airport Express via iTunes to an external DAC connected to my stereo system?"

If you want S/PDIF coaxial (the lowest jitter option) to go to your high-quality DAC, then yes is the answer.

Would the Airport Express be a better digital connection to my DAC than using an M-Audio Transit? Anybody have the two and done a comparison?

transit = GARBAGE. POS wants to upsample everything to 48k

the express setup is:

Macintosh HD : Applications : Utilities

But the airport express outputs to toslink. Isn't toslink inferior to other cabling methods?

Now if airport express had USB out for external DAC processing, then. . . wow!!! But then how to USB in DAC's transfer the digital USB signal for DA processing? Is another digital to digital conversion needed like what happens in the waveterminal?

Transit does not upsample to 48 kHz. I can program Transit to do 44.1 or 24/96 and it passes iTunes, MP3 and AC3. It uses a custom driver that bypasses Windows Kmixer.

Transit is probably not the best solution for iMac. I have heard that the drivers are not realy optimized for iMac. A modified Edirol with coax S/PDIF out is probably the ticket. It uses standard drivers - you dont need to install any.

The Airport express would probably make a good adapter if the wireless network solution was buffered well and isochronous. I'm not convinced based on what I have read.