The OFFICAL Apple TV thread

Apple Lossless (like other lossless) is somewhat zipped wav/aiff, so when you play, program is unzipping and playing at the same time, thus it DOES sound different compared WAV/AIFF. I have compared WAV to APPLE LOSSLESS and WAV was better. I have yet to to do more work, with more songs, to figure out the format to stick with. The pain with a WAV is that no place for metadata like cover art, but AIFF (AIFF is somewhat WAV+Apple+metadata) has that, so I will probably stick with that, if I find no significant changes to the sound compared to wav. No Apple lossless for me...

Also I am not happy with a Apple tv steeo, even fed to hi-end dac Audio note. But my dac has no Toslink, so i had to use battery powered coaxial - toslink converter... right now I am raising funds for the Monarchy Audio DIP and crossing my fingers that this will be it. My Marantz universal player ($1599 in 2003) eats appleTV+2-3k$ AN dac for breakfast...

Wadia recommends ripping CD's as .wav files for maximum audio performance.

I upgraded my toslink connection to Lifatec Silflex glass, and am very pleased. It is amazing the difference, especially in the highs. More shimmer and clarity in the upper registers.

Apple devices won't play WAV. Not sure about Macs, but the iPod/iPad/iPhone, AE or ATV won't play them.

Any scheme or format or compression from which you can reconstruct a bit-accurate copy of the original should be the same......FLAC and ALAC both qualify as to others.

The knowledge at the Apple store is limited for audio junkies.
My question is......Does the digital out of the ATV have its own clock? The AirportExpress is async and has a massive jitter problem. The AE relies on the incoming signal for clock and sometimes will even miss the first half second of a sony while it locks in.

Also, any format from which you can recover a bit-accurate copy of the original should yield good results.