goodguy

It’s been almost a decade since I got out of the hi-fi industry.  I still have a few of the trappings of that industry - mainly an insanely good pair of speakers and a relatively decent power amp - but they have been wasting away given that my entire music source these days is on iTunes on my laptop.  That has been plugged into a (surprisingly excellent) PAL from Tivoli but it was a lonely life for the hifi gear. 

I’ve used an Airport Express as my wifi router for some time, but its age meant I had to choose between a decent internet connection or wirelessly streaming music (it requires up-to-date firmware to stream from iTunes but that updated firmware slows the internet connection to a crawl).  In a move that seemed a little wasteful, I purchased a new Airport Express to remedy this - while they look identical and share the same feature set, the internals and firmware are upgraded so can do everything it needs to happily.

My home setup is now iTunes on my Macbook Pro (and controlled via Remote over wifi from an iPod Touch) streaming over wifi to my power amp (via said Airport Express) and out through the Dynaudio’s.  Radio is all listened to over the interweb. And it’s magnificent.  Certainly, the source is doing a huge disservice to the speakers, as the Airport Express is doing the Digital-Analog Conversion - but you can run optical out from it, which would hand those duties over to a much higher-grade DAC should you so choose.

What amazes me is that I now have a multi-room (you can run multiple Airport Expresses off one iTunes/Remote combo) server-based music system for the cost of an Airport Express ($159) and iPod Touch ($299 I believe?). Basically Sonos for a hell of a lot cheaper.

I searched intensively but am yet to find what I believe would be the ultimate stereo for this - an optical-in DAC/power amp combo in a Bose SoundDock form.  You could just plug one in at each room with an Airport Express and voila, multiroom audio with house-wide remote control ability (on your iPhone or just buy an iPod Touch for it).  Hell, someone could potentially get Apple to let them licence the Airport Express trickery and build that into the unit as well.  “Here millions of people what have iTunes, an iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad and a wifi network  - plug one of these $699 units into a powerpoint in any room you want music in and you’re done” seems like a hell of a sales pitch.