You need the airport or some kind of DAC in conjunction with either a USB or firewire audio device. The Mac Mini does not have an audio output or a digital coax. I have a very hard time believing that the performance of the airport going directly into a preamp will rival the quality of going USB or firewire into a decent DAC. There are also some oddball, but highly regarded, DACs like the Apogee that have a built-in USB port. My configuration uses a Waveterminal U24 USB device into a stand alone upsampler and DAC. The sound rivals my DV-50s.
If you are running in an Apple-only environment, you may want to see if you can convert your .wav files to Apple's lossless compressed format. I do not believe you compromise quality, since it is lossless, but you would save significant disk space. (You can then use your second disk as a backup of your first disk--see my thread on having four HD crashes in 2 years).
If you are running in an Apple-only environment, you may want to see if you can convert your .wav files to Apple's lossless compressed format. I do not believe you compromise quality, since it is lossless, but you would save significant disk space. (You can then use your second disk as a backup of your first disk--see my thread on having four HD crashes in 2 years).