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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

Showing 2 responses by robr45

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.
robr45's avatar
robr45
319 posts
 
Percisely- I understood it to take it to unpack the alac on the ae side to digital or analog. The point to all of this seems to be that if you are going to use airtunes, there is no point in using any other losslec codec other than alac. I see many people state that aiff/wav sounds better but I don't see how this could be.
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