Airport Extreme to DAC

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I glanced at the article and it incorrectly says

Macs can natively support up to 24/96, played through iTunes or other software. However, without a couple settings tweaks, audio files with resolution higher than 16-bit/44.1kHz will automatically be downsampled to that resolution.

They can support higher resolutions if your hardware can.
The However is correct. Unless you use software that automatically adjusts the resolution (like Pure Music) iTunes does convert everything to whatever you have Audio/Midi set to.

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Sounds like a swell start, but I would be wary about the imatch bits. Sounds, and I am sure is, quite convenient -- but it looks like it will feed you back less than CD quality of everything. To quote their materials, "Even better, all the music iTunes matches plays back from iCloud at 256-Kbps AAC DRM-free quality — even if your original copy was of lower quality." This is less than CD quality, and of course, "even better", it will feed you back that quality "even if your original was of HIGHER quality" as well....

So, if you've got tons of stuff of lesser sample quality, this could be a nice upgrade to that software. But for anything CD quality or better, relying on the icloud will be a significant downgrade. Has it's place, sure, but be sure to keep a local copy in the highest quality available. With the likes of the Ayre, you'll definitely come to appreciate (and demand) the difference.

Again I want to thank everyone for the input and enlightenment. I finally got all my gear together. Cables and monitor adapters were a pain in the butt. I had to drive to the apple store just to see what I'm doing during set-up. Buying a used Mac mini, the connector to monitor was the wrong one. Got up and running it took some time to set up. I'm checking out songbird and fidelia to use as my player for HD Tracks. Songbird is free, fidelia has a 15 day demo then 20 bucks. I'm sorta liking fidelia but too soon to know for sure. To avoid rambling, I will make one last comment to future readers of this thread... Research, Forums, Blogs, are all others opinions.... These are tools to help and give you food for thought. To get it right ( whatever right is ).. Do the Work

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Don't know about those two programs but get one that adjusts playback rates on the fly. Some, like iTunes, are stuck at whatever Audio Midi was set to when they started. So if AM was set to 16/44.1 when iTunes starts it will down sample a 24/96 file to that rate. If you then set it to 24/96 iTunes will still down sample but AM will then up sample. To get it right you have to restart iTunes.

Programs like Pure Music take care of it in the background.

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