Apple Airport Express Very Cool Product

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.

Yes, Toslink is inferior. That's why I mod all of these converters to have a coax S/PDIF output, with a short cable attached.

If the Airport Express output wired USB, then you would still need a USB to S/PDIF wired converter. The main advantage of the AE is to eliminate the USB cable and have music throughout the house.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio
Manufacturer

I recently installed Airport Express with about 4 hours of hard work and frustration, finally doig a hard reset of the device and starting over. Also there is a newer version of Airport software that works better than the supplied CD. Now the only problem is that it drops out a lot streaming radio stations, which is the main thing I use it for. Any suggestions?

Hey..I already posted this below, but not sure if folks will read some of the older threads...so here goes again, my appologies if this is bad forum behavior:

Hey all,

Newbie here..so bear with me.

I'm currently sending musci from my older G3 PowerBook laptop to the Airport Express unit, and than out of the AX unit via mini-optical to toslink into my HT receiver (Onkyo 502).

This sounds pretty good at this point in time, but I'm interested in how I could improve the sounds.

After looking at products like the Waveterminal, it seems that I have to power that unit via USB. Since the whole point of this (for me) is to be wireless, that's not an option as I don't want to run a USB cable from my laptop to the Waveterminal device.

Can any of you guys recommend an entry level solution that would be able to take the toslink optical output from the AX and convert to digital coaxial, and also hopefully allow me to improve the final sounds quality coming out of my Onkyo 502?

As a further fyi - for speakers (not that it really matters) I'm using a 5.1 system with Polk 35/25RTi for the front and back, a Mission center and a HSU sub.
Thanks for any help!

Chris