airport express questions

Jax2 - Itunes is not the best choice for ripping, I agree. I also agree that numbers published by Stereophile or other magazines are meaningless. I would even say that best tested devices have often the worst sound (there are reasons for that).

Stereophile reviews are pretty good but they tend to review only companies that advertise with them.

going to mp3, the bits are lost. compare file sizes. there is a reason why people use mp3 on ipod's because of the storage savings. also, it really doesn't matter what the AE uses to compress or manipulate the data from itunes, when it comes out of the AE, it will be the same as what it is feed.
an AE device is no different than the modems 30 years ago. the transmitting modem would send the data in a certain compressed mode (itunes on a mac) possibly with security built in, then the receiving modem (AE) would unbundle the data, strip the security bits,uncompress the data, and the remote data is byte for byte the same as the source.
this might be the only time i would agree with stereophile.
also, try xld if you are using a mac.
if you get a chance, listen to the amarra software for the itunes/mac combination. it sounded pretty good at ces.

Now, can someone tell me why, when running my airport express to a CA 840c using optical, that I periodically have an awful, glassy, fingernail-on-chalkboard sound?
Files are either alac or mp3 and with or without error correction when put on the confuser.
It doesn't happen at the same spot each time, but seemingly randomly.

Any suggestions?

Rbstehno - I rip files into ALAC not only to save space but also to avoid additional operation (ALAC compression) that computer has to do in real time to send data to AE (it is not a dedicated server).

the computer can do this and much more if you have a decent machine. when you stream your music, how much cpu are you using? are you telling me that you are maxing out your cpu? the computer has to do quite a bit of work to get data off the disk, into it's memory buffers, and then package it up to send it over the network. all of this messaging of data happens in memory, after it is read from disk. if you system is using less than 80% of your cpu, it is not a big deal. now if you are saturating the cpu, now you need to offload some processing.