Apple Airport Express and other Wireless Options for Audio

Yo. I've been thinking about setting up speakers in my house so that I can stream music from either computer or iOS devices (between my wife and I we now own a total of 2 iPads and 2 iPhones), but I want to make sure that I understand what the capabilities of the system are.

If I understand correctly, I can simply plug an Airport into the wall, plug any 3.5 mm set of speakers into the Airport and then stream music from any of the iOS devices to those speakers?

1) Is it really that simple?
2) Does it also work with being able to plug an audio receiver into an Aiport Express?
3) Any recommendations for reasonably small speakers with good sound quality (with a 3.5 mm plug)? I have a set of Logitech speakers on my computer (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...) that seemed to be a reasonable size but are really, really tinny.
4) Can you have multiple Airport Expresses (?) and stream music from different iOS devices to them at the same time (i.e. stream kids music to my daughters' playroom and my music in my office - different sets of speakers and Airports, obviously).

Thanks in advance,

Tach

If I understand correctly, I can simply plug an Airport into the wall, plug any 3.5 mm set of speakers into the Airport and then stream music from any of the iOS devices to those speakers?

IME, it really is that simple. An icon shows up in iTunes or any of several iOS apps, which lets you pull up a menu to choose where to send the audio.

I can't really address your other questions, though, since I only have one of the things and it's connected directly to some speakers I've had for years.

I can't address that specifically. I've never never thought of using an Airport express for mobile audio. Instead my wife and I have a Squeezebox Boom. We connect it to our main iTunes computer in the house and control it from iPhones / iPads. This allows us to have our entire music collection at our fingertips at whatever Squeezebox we choose to play it at. And the Squeezebox sounds really good, handling the speaker part.

I also know people who have used an Apple TV for this. Taking the Apple TV and basically setting it up as a headless device with the audio piped out to a receiver or something like that via the optical cable in the back. Then you can use AirPlay to push music from your collection or your iOS device to the Apple TV.

1) Is it really that simple?

Yes. Once you configure iTunes to 'look for remote speakers', as soon as it detects any Airport Expresses on the local network, you will get a dropdown box in the lower right corner of the program. Change that box from local speakers to the Airport, and your sound will start coming from there instead. Note that there's a fair bit of lag, so it's really only good for streaming music.

2) Does it also work with being able to plug an audio receiver into an Aiport Express?

Yes, you need a special cable from Apple. The analog out jack has a fiber out in the bottom of the well. The special cables look like a normal headphone jack on one end, except the very tip is transparent, filled with optical fiber. The metal part surrounds the optical fiber, it's not solid metal anymore. The other end is a standard S/PDIF connector that goes into your receiver.

You don't have to buy the cables from Apple anymore. They'd probably be a lot cheaper from other providers.

3) Any recommendations for reasonably small speakers with good sound quality (with a 3.5 mm plug)?

I'm too lazy to dig it up right now, but Thin_J did a Quest For Good Small Speakers awhile ago, and posted an epic thread here in Tech and Help. If you can't find it, I can try to scare it up.

I have a set of Logitech speakers on my computer (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...) that seemed to be a reasonable size but are really, really tinny.

Logitech is probably the single worst semi-mainstream manufacturer of speakers. Anything from them I've ever heard has been horrible. You don't have to spend a lot of money to get good sound, but Logitech is proof positive that you can spend a fair bit and get absolute sh*t.

4) Can you have multiple Airport Expresses (?) and stream music from different iOS devices to them at the same time (i.e. stream kids music to my daughters' playroom and my music in my office - different sets of speakers and Airports, obviously).

Sure, on a 1:1 basis... I don't think you can stream to multiple Expresses at once. And you could run into bandwidth problems if you try to do too many; I believe iTunes drives the Airport with a lossless compressed signal (which is why it's a little laggy), so you're talking probably 500Kbit per stream. Most wireless networks can push at least 5 megabits, so you can run several streams even on a fairly crummy one. You can potentially have problems if you try to run too many, or if you saturate your wireless with other traffic.

Yes, it all just works. It's how I have my audio set up right now, and the ability for any device in the house to just grab control of the main amp in the living room is just awesome. We do it for stuff we stream to ipads, and for music from any of our various phones, which are all hooked to iTunes Match. It's all a system that now just works.

Note: if do a quick google, you'll find a ton of peripherals that now support Airplay natively, from the 99 dollar apple TV (cheaper than an actual new airport), to high end receivers to some powered speaker systems.

http://www.overstock.com/Electronics...{keyword}&adtype=pla

Airplay appears to be a really nice protocol, able to stream losslessly with zero effort, so use it happily, knowing that it's a good solution. It will not impair your sound one iota, as long as your network is good.

Moved to Tech.

Huh. That's amazing. When we got our Apple TV we tried looking for cheap speakers that were as good as our Squeezebox Boom so we could replace the Squeezebox and affiliated software with Airplay everywhere. May have to look into this again. The tricky part being finding quality speakers without a receiver.

Like a Bose system that does Airplay or something.

Bose is always overpriced, and usually under-spec. They're reasonably competent speakers with a massive marketing campaign. You can get genuinely GOOD speakers, much better than what they're offering, for a lot less money.

Malor wrote:

Bose is always overpriced, and usually under-spec. They're reasonably competent speakers with a massive marketing campaign. You can get genuinely GOOD speakers, much better than what they're offering, for a lot less money.

I didn't literally mean Bose proper. I just meant that idea of good quality speakers that I could run off of Airplay. What's a good brand these days? I'm an audiophile in terms of headphones but for speakers I just have the Squeezebox and a really good set of speakers in the office (Altec Lansing).

Audioengine.

Edit: audioengine makes truly excellent powered speakers. but you have to provide the airplay connectivity

psu_13 wrote:

Audioengine.

Edit: audioengine makes truly excellent powered speakers. but you have to provide the airplay connectivity

That's fine. An all-in-one unit would be ideal, but I'd happily go this route in place of the Squeezebox if I felt I could get the same quality. Don't get me wrong, the Squeezebox is amazing and has served its purpose well, but my wife knows how to run an iPhone / iPod and isn't as familiar with iPeng. Plus we don't have our playlists using the Squeezebox.

Yeah, playlist support has always been weak in Slimserver. It's barely improved in years... the weakest point of that system.

There's some mode where it can pull playlists out of iTunes, though, so if you've built them there, I think it can read them.

I remain very fond of Squeezeboxes for this purpose, by the way. One feature that they have, which I don't believe Airplay does, is synced playback across groups of speakers. You can have multiple devices, including computers running the Squeezeplay application, and put them in arbitrary groups, and stream the same thing to all of them at once. It's really nice for filling a big house with sound, or for having separate 'zones' that cross multiple rooms.

Problem is what we really need is for my wife to easily be able to stream that single she just downloaded after watching Glee. Okay, we don't *need* that, but the Squeezebox is still incomprehensible to her. We'd listen to more music and watch less TV if she could work the stereo of of her existing playlist on her phone or iPad.

EDIT: Oh, and I picked up an airport express tonight. Hoping to start with pairing that with some speakers I have kicking around to see if she takes to it.

iTunes can play to multiple Airplay sinks at once. Both on the desktop and under iOS.

*And*, the iOS iTunes Remote application is pretty nice. Makes it easy to play any content that is in your desktop iTunes from the iPad/iPhone fairly transparently.

DSGamer wrote:
psu_13 wrote:

Audioengine.

Edit: audioengine makes truly excellent powered speakers. but you have to provide the airplay connectivity

That's fine. An all-in-one unit would be ideal, but I'd happily go this route in place of the Squeezebox if I felt I could get the same quality. Don't get me wrong, the Squeezebox is amazing and has served its purpose well, but my wife knows how to run an iPhone / iPod and isn't as familiar with iPeng. Plus we don't have our playlists using the Squeezebox.

I was gonna mention that I just saw a review of the A5+ speakers. Might be a good solution if you don't want to mess with an amplifier and have enough money. I have these Klipsch speakers hooked up to a Maverick Audio D2/A1 setup for my computer. I really like them. You could find a pretty inexpensive/okay amplifier solution to power them probably, and they are only 200 bucks.

Just bought the A5+ set based on recommendations here, listening to it in the store and reviews online. Will report back on how it works. I tried running the Airport Express through my Squeezebox last night an it got stuck in a mode where the face lights are blinking. So this was good timing, I suppose. I'll report back on how it sounds.

I tried running the Airport Express through my Squeezebox last night

Wait, what?

DSGamer wrote:

Just bought the A5+ set based on recommendations here, listening to it in the store and reviews online. Will report back on how it works.

Nice! I'd love to hear your thoughts on them.

Malor wrote:
I tried running the Airport Express through my Squeezebox last night

Wait, what?

The squeezebox has a line-in the function that allows it to behave as a normal speaker set. I was just being lazy and decided to try using that instead before I purchased a pair of speakers. It would've worked fine except that when I went into the menu for the squeezebox to change it to wine line-in I accidentally changed my network settings to something that didn't work anymore. Now it's borked. I found the squeezebox can be very temperamental when it comes to network settings.

Huh, I've never had a problem with mine. I use DHCP reservations -- the Squeezeboxes always get the same IP numbers, but they don't know that. As far as they're concerned, they're just normal DHCP clients.

I'm not sure that's even necessary anymore, as I think Squeezeboxes can now identify themselves by name, rather than IP number. But once upon a time, Slimserver wasn't that smart.

Well, the A5+ speakers sound amazing. They're really big, though, and have me wondering if I should have just gotten the A2s. Anyone have those?

DSGamer wrote:

Well, the A5+ speakers sound amazing. They're really big, though, and have me wondering if I should have just gotten the A2s. Anyone have those?

Are you talking about the sound being big or the dimensions being big? I looked up the dimensions because I was curious (10.75" (27cm) x 7" (18cm) x 7.75" (20cm)). Those are pretty regular size bookshelf speakers. If you reduce the size, you'll most likely reduce the sound quality. Good to hear they sound awesome.

tuffalobuffalo wrote:
DSGamer wrote:

Well, the A5+ speakers sound amazing. They're really big, though, and have me wondering if I should have just gotten the A2s. Anyone have those?

Are you talking about the sound being big or the dimensions being big? I looked up the dimensions because I was curious (10.75" (27cm) x 7" (18cm) x 7.75" (20cm)). Those are pretty regular size bookshelf speakers. If you reduce the size, you'll most likely reduce the sound quality. Good to hear they sound awesome. :)

Mostly the size. We keep a pretty low profile for having a tech geek in the house. 32" HDTV, a couple laptops with some NAS drives stuck in a closet. So the speakers stand out in our apartment. We'll probably get used to it, but obviously the Squeezebox was much smaller.

The sound is great, though. I may even get another Airport Extreme + A2s for the bedroom.

It's very difficult to do good sound in very small speakers; this is part of why Bose tends not to be too great. Their satellites simply don't have the size they need to reproduce even very far into the midbass, and they have to do all sorts of trickery with moving some of the frequencies to their subwoofer units. Their push to get people into the smaller speakers did them no real favors.

Their sound systems LOOK better, but don't actually sound as good -- this is part of why they have such massive marketing campaigns, because humans are really good at fooling themselves about sound. Tell them the tiny speakers sound wonderful, and they'll hear them as being wonderful, if they don't have experience with great speakers. If they've spent some time with better speakers, they'll realize that the Bose are only okay. But lots of people buy Bose as their first 'real' system, and so they never realize how much less they could spend for equal sound, or how much better they could do for the same price. But, almost always, that requires physically larger satellites.

In other words, part of the reason your A5s sound good at a reasonable price is because they're larger than you wanted. You'll probably be trading away some quality if you do the smaller A2s in the bedroom. The size is not a flaw, at least from a sound reproduction standpoint, it's a feature.

There are some additional minor improvements if you go to full-size floorstanders, but honestly, bookshelves big enough to run 5" drivers, plus a subwoofer, will sound just about as good, will be much more flexible about placement, and will usually be cheaper. I think that should be the default solution for most folks, unless there's a compelling reason to do something else.

DSGamer wrote:

Well, the A5+ speakers sound amazing. They're really big, though, and have me wondering if I should have just gotten the A2s. Anyone have those?

I have the A2s. They are also nice. They don't have quite the same presence (more obviously rolled off as you get lower down in frequency), but sound remarkably similar IMHO.

Okay, so I got an Airport Express to try and see how things would go and it was a bit of a pain, but I can now wirelessly stream from my iPod and iPad to the audio receiver and speakers in my office. It is most excellent. Setting the Airport Express up with a Windows (Vista) PC was more difficult than it needed to be (It constantly wants to be the main router and for some reason while setting it up, it liked to shut off the wireless card on my PC... I have no idea). Anyway, it's up and running.

I also went and tracked down the aforementioned Thin_J thread and picked up one of the sets of speakers and they have beautiful sound.

Now that I know how to set up the AEs, I'm just waiting until next month when I get my bonus to get a few more of them and a few more sets of speakers to start expanding the audio options for the house.

Thanks for all of the thoughts in the thread.

Yeah. I'm going to take a look at the above speakers and one more Airport Express for the bedroom. What a handy solution.

I'm expecting a Logitech Squeezebox Touch today! My plan is to rip lossless to my PC in my office and play in the family room where my good 2 channel stereo is located. I had considered getting a very nice CD player but decided to stream instead. I'm hoping the audio quality is good enough to not require a DAC between Squeezebox and receiver.

Nice discussion on the Audioengine stuff, the speakers and DAC there look great.

I'm hoping the audio quality is good enough to not require a DAC between Squeezebox and receiver.

Well, I have the older SB2 and 3, and they have absolutely the best DACs I have ever personally experienced. The part they use only costs like $5, but it sounds amazing.

Typically, though, you'll use fiber to transmit the data to the receiver over S/PDIF, so the DAC in the Squeezebox becomes kind of irrelevant. Most modern receivers digitize any incoming analog signal, run it through internal processing, and then run it back through another DAC for output to speakers, so the quality of your upstream DACs in an analog chain becomes mostly irrelevant. The choke point is the ADC/DAC pair on the receiver. Your final output can't possibly sound better than the worst of those two components, no matter how good your stereo stack is, and it could sound worse, if an upstream DAC sucks.

So just handing the receiver the data in digital form in the first place avoids a whole DAC->ADC step in the analog chain -- your limiting factor becomes just the DAC in the receiver. It's all digital right up to the point that it's actually amplified to the speakers. There's no loss or degradation of signal, just bits being massaged until they're translated to analog form, one time only.

EAC, ripping to FLAC, is a excellent solution for ripping your library. Slimserver handles FLAC very nicely. The big advantage to FLAC is that, once you're done, you never have to do it again, at least as long as you keep good backups. You've got a bitperfect, compressed copy of your CDs, and you can freely generate any other lossy or lossless format you want. (If you're looking for something to do that, Foobar2K is probably the best bulk converter running on any platform.)

As a supplement to ripping in FLAC, I wrote a script to iterate through all my music directories and generate PAR2 files, as extra insurance. I figure spending an extra 10% on storage space to make the files all but immune to bitrot is cheap insurance. Mass ripping really sucks, and I never want to have to do it again.