New Apple TV & Airport Express

Today, I got both an Airport Express hooked up to my Audioengine A5+ speakers and an Apple TV connected to my home theater setup. I've been sitting on the couch for the past few minutes doing a quick comparison between a CD playing via HDMI from my Sony blu-ray player and the same album playing from Apple Lossless files through the Apple TV via HDMI.

Am I correct in assuming that in both cases the A/D conversion would be in my receiver which, should in theory, be virtually identical? They sure should nearly identical, but if I had to pick a winner it would be the CD. Obviously, the PC to Apple TV adds a few more links in the chain so one would expect there to be more degredation introduced to the final result.

My biggest reason for the comparison was to see if I should get interested in a stand alone D/A unit for my tube amplifier. At this point, I think I'll stick to CDs for the critical listening and use the Apple stuff to replace the 6-disk CD player for whole house background listening. I'm not sure why I didn't get these before, they are sweet!

My wife already loves being able to stream music from her iPhone to the Audioengine speakers. I also already love the mirror feature on the Apple TV, I can already see many ways for this to be useful and fun.