Apple Airplay Sound Quality

If i have all my music stored in Apple Lossless format and I'm streaming it directly from my iphone to my airport express and in to my Bryston DAC is it the same as streaming it from my laptop?

In other words, if the files are apple lossless on my iphone, are they streamed that way, or down converted somehow?

Stereophile says it's CD quality. 16 bits 48khz.

Airport Express is CD quality - 16 bits of and 44.1KHZ

Of course you need to CD quality (lossless) files in order to get the full benefit of CD quality.

Single hangup with the AE is HUGE jitter. Some DACs, my 840c among them, simply do not like this amount of jitter, and have audible problems.

Sterophile had reviewed the first iteration of the AE and found its analog output to be somewhat lacking but as a transport, it achieved reasonable performance.

I am somewhat surprised to hear about the jitter issue via the optical output as mine works perfectly fine as did Stereophile's test unit.

It does play CD quality recordings without any issues but I will give a quick experiment this evening to see if it will do anything higher out of the optical output.