"Mini" to Optical for Airport Express

Streetdaddy - the Toslink input is available, I have not updated the website yet. I'm currently evacuated to a friends house by a 10K acre forest fire in Oregon. The Pace-Car also now has S/PDIF output as well for standard DAC's.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio

Streetdaddy - I2S is the native interface for most D/A chips. Whenh you send a S/PDIF signal to a DAC, it must be converted first to I2S before going to the D/A chip. The fact that this conversion is not necessary reduces jitter.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio

Thanks Steve once again for being so generous with knowledge. I'm very interested in the Pace-Car as my wife and I are mostly enjoying music at home using iTunes. We have an iMac G-5 streaming to an AE, to the Toslink input of my Marantz prepro. A curious glitch we've had with the AE is we get annoying noise bursts between tracks on occasion. I've unfruitfully petitioned Audiogoners for answers. But you're the man I believe knows what the fudge is going on. Would the Pace-Car eliminate the sound bursts and let me hear signifcantly lessen jitter in one swell swoop?

Hals_den - This is the first time I've heard the "sound burst" complaint from an AE. Since it only happens between tracks, this is at least a clue. I need to know if it ever happens when playing long playlists or only when manually selecting a new track. Also, are you double-clicking on the track or using the mouse select and then the play button?

If it is the iTunes player injecting these, then the Pace-Car will probably not eliminate them. It is probably bad data bursts and the Pace-Car just sends through whatever data you input to it.

Steve N.

Thanks for the honest answer Steve. The noise does happen when playing from a large playlist. Lately, we've been using the party shuffle mode of iTunes and the problem happen in that mode as well. It seems to happen more with large music files as in AIFF encoded and longer songs.