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Airport Extreme to DAC

I'm awaiting a new Ayre QB-9 USB this will be my first delve into digital music serving. I've read many threads and done the google searches etc. I'm leaning towards using a Mac mini to serve the DAC. I have a Mac desktop upstairs with my iTunes and media player already on it. I will also play around with Hi-Rez in the future. I use a airport extreme right now with wi-fi and a 1 TB hard drive. Airport extreme has a USB port on the back that is used for a printer. Could I set that Airport Extreme up in my rack and run the DAC using my iPad or iphone to controll the playlists?
128x128madranker
mezmo
516 posts
 
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.
madranker's avatar
madranker OP
15 posts
 
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
herman
2,259 posts
 
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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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