Apple Airport Express

Unless I'm watching something, I'm usually listening to music. Before Ipod, that used to be compact discs played through proper (ish!) speakers. When the iPod appeared, I got used to playing my music off the laptop housing the iTunes library. The plus point is that I now listen to a much wider variety of music and Party Shuffle means it just keeps on going picking new tracks out for me.

The big negative was the relative lack of sound quality coming out of the laptop speakers. That's gotten a little bit worse with Laptop 2 (reviewed below). Laptop 2 (aka Wideboy - yep I have lack of imagination when it comes to network names !) still has acceptable sound but it's nowhere near the quality of a decent speaker set up.

This is where the Airport Express from Apple comes in. Here's a link to Apple's official page with the marketing blurb. To summarise, it's a white box which you plug into the mains. It can act as a wifi router, in other words you can connect it to the internet via a modem that plugs into an Ethernet port. So I could use it to be a router for my cable modem (possible future plan). It's also a network Printer Server and has the usual features of a wifi router, i.e. firewall and wifi encryption. It will also connect up to your existing router to extend the network, supporting the WEP and WPA/WPA2 encryption protocols.

But the absolute key thing that makes this device unique is the audio output. There's a port that can be used as either a headphone analogue output or a mini-TOS optical digital output. I'm using the analogue output.

I've had my laptop hooked up to one of these for a few weeks now, what's my impression of it ? I'll admit to a false start on this gadget. It was a tad embarassing when I tried it out at my mum's & dad's place only to have it suffer the sound break up problem. That seems to be an iTunes 8 issue, which seems to be getting confirmed by what I've observed here.

My configuration at the moment is : Vista, iTunes 7.6.2.9, Airport Express (old version), Philips wifi router. It's gone through some extensive testing .... which over the last fortnight has involved playing over 2.6 days worth of different music tracks :-)

Ease of connection - hiccup again at mum's and dad's place but here it was connected very easily.

Quality of sound - excellent. I'd say "almost perfect" here. It is that good. The odd comment on my main blog will show how I'm enjoying the hi-fi equivalent sound quality. When the mp3 format came out, I was skeptical due to the lossly compression algorithm it uses. It may be lossy but at 128kbit/s encoding, you can still pick out all the subtleties in the music. So when you get intricate music like on Dire Straits Making Movies, you can pick out the interplay between piano, guitar, voice, percussion. There's also things like being able to hear Tori Amos tapping pedals on the piano while playing.

I'm not sure how it would match up to playing the songs off the cd but I'm not sure if the difference would be too audible. I've also not listened to much classical as I've mostly kept the classical music away from the iTunes library. However I will say that the odd track off Peer Gynt and parts of the Conan soundtrack sounded good :-)

Overall verdict - fully satisfied with this gadget, it's done a lot to improve my enjoyment of the music I listen to. I've not totally explored its functionality but it does an excellent job of wirelessly sending iTunes music to my remote speakers without having another wire draped across the room. It sits there, does its job quietly and competently, which is all you can ask of a gadget.

Recommended for iTunes people but watch out for needing to change your iTunes version backwards to an earlier one than version 8.

But ... out of the box it only supports sending audio from iTunes. It is possible to get audio from other applications across to the Airport Express but that requires third party software in the form of Airfoil. It's an interesting utility, which I've had a short look at. It allows sending of audio from Any application to the Airport Express. However, it has limitations which may become apparent when trying to use it. You see, to do its job it needs to break into the Digital Rights Management chain, which can and will cause fights between Vista and its applications. I was unsuccessful in getting Airfoil to send one of the sample audio tracks I got with Laptop 2 but managed to get audio sent across that originated in Skyplayer.
(see geek-note below for Skyplayer vs Airport)

An interesting little utility. However, try the free trial before paying for the licence in case it doesn't play nicely with the applications you want to use with it. Personally, I don't have a need to send audio other than through iTunes, so I'm waiting until the dollar exchange rate is better before I spend the $25 :-).

Airport Express - recommended. It gets a Me Like.
Airfoil - interesting ... will be keeping this one in mind for when "want" turns into "need" :-)

Geeky things to finish with - the Network Meter Gadget I have installed in Vista says that the Airport uses 1 Mbit/s of bandwidth. That's pretty consistent, although it can double if you jump between parts of a track due to there being about 5 seconds of buffering on the audio stream. That's easy meat for a 802.11 G set up but may be awkward for 802.11 B. I have a big but though. I need to test this more but it was looking like that 1Mb/s stream was upsetting the ability of Skyplayer to stream live telly properly. The Airport stream was ok but the Skyplayer stream was breaking up badly. I suspect that might be a fault of my router though.

The two reviews I've posted so far have been glowing ones it seems - but they won't always be :-) Some day I'll get pushed into a rant by my router, which could end up being fun to read :-).