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airport express questions

The airport express is equipped with a mini-jack that is a combo: analog and digital toslink. Monster sells a variety pack of cables to go with the unit, including a mini-to-full toslink cable, and a mini-to-RCA cable.
How can I be sure that I am streaming digital audio with airtunes? Is there a box in some dialogue window that I need to check? For analog audio, which I don't want, does the airport express have a crappy internal DAC, or would the laptop be wirelessly streaming analog from its own crappy internal DAC? Laptop is a 5 year old Sony Vaio, windows XP. Thanks.
realremo
kijanki's avatar
kijanki
4,432 posts
 
Realremo - I think that Airport Express receives files in Apple Losless format. Keeping files stored in Apple Losless makes one conversion less.
rbstehno
1,480 posts
 
the airport express will receive any type of file that you ship it. you can use itunes or airfoil for xm/sirius radio. if you want a better connection, get a glass toslink cable. big difference over a plastic toslink. i go from the airport express or apple tv into a jitter device using glass toslink, then use a coax digital cable into an external dac.
danlib1
819 posts
 
You can buy a great mini to full toslink cable, all glass fiber, from Van Den Hul- the Optocoupler II. Highly recommended. Or you can buy a convertor (full to mini) that works perfectly well and use that with a standard toslink. I do however recommend glass fiber- the difference is not subtle.
robr45's avatar
robr45
319 posts
 
I believe that Kijanki is saying that airtunes protocol utilizes apple lossless as the file type from the pc to endpoint. So any file sent via airtunes is converted to lossless and then back- aiff, aac, mp3, etc.

That is how I understand it works as well.
kijanki's avatar
kijanki
4,432 posts
 
Robr45 - That's what I meant, except I don't thing it goes back to MP3. If you start with MP3, for instance, Apple Lossles Compressor will uncompress it to some temporary format to compress again into APLL and then on receiving end it uncompresses to temporary format again to convert it to s/pdif format that goes out to toslink - no need to invoke MP3 compressor again. I'm not sure if it even needs to uncompress on receiving end - it might have algorithm converting APLL to s/pdif on the fly.
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