Airport Express? Airport Extreme? both or neither?

[londonmystery]

Right so here is my issue. I have a very large house (4 floors). My router is on the top floor where the main phone line is, it will be connected via ethernet to my soon to be bought iMac.

My MBP and the wife's Vaio are normally used in the living room on the first floor. They are connected wirelessly and work fine.

I also have a PS3 and play quite a lot online but have to connect wirelessly. average signal strength is 45-50%.

My average dowload speed is 16-18 mbps

There are also stereos on all floors.

Question is this; I would like to increase the signal strength on my PS3 and play music from the iMac across all floors, which, if either would I need to do theses things? is the extreme a router? Please be gentle as I am a mac newbie and am still learning.

Thanks in advance for any help.

 

[aristobrat]

The Airport Extreme and Airport Express can act as both wireless access points and routers, although the routing feature can be turned off if needed. (Most places only need one device acting as a router).

Both the Express and Extreme have the ability to expand (i.e. relay the signal) of a wireless network, but the catch is that they can only do that on a network where all of the routers are Airports. (That's not entirely true -- some models of Linksys can be hacked to work with the Airports, but you don't hear about many people doing that nowadays). The other catch with this is that expanding networks slows them down a little bit (as the extra Airports now have to do the double-duty of listening for wireless traffic, then rebroadcasting it).

The Express is the only device that lets your hookup speakers and stream music it to it (from iTunes, or other special programs, like AirFoil).

If you had either an Express or Extreme on the top floor, you could put another Express or Extreme on the bottom floor to extend the network. That should improve the signal quality down there.

I'm not sure what you mean by play music across all floors. If you wanted to put speakers on each floor, you could also put an Express on each floor (hooked up to a set of speakers) and then use iTunes to stream music to them.

If you haven't seen it already, check out this link:
http://www.apple.com/wifi/

If you check out each of the Airports individually, it shows you how easy they are to setup, etc.

 

[londonmystery]

Thanks, I have sound systems on all four floors and yes want to play music through all of them from the iMac.

From what you are saying I would need 1 Extreme to replace my current router and 3 express. I could then do the above and increase the signal strength around the house including to my PS3.

 

[aristobrat]

You should be able to do that.

Hopefully your thread will get a few more replies from people having done that.

 

[cube]

AirTunes/AirFoil are only good for music. There's WAY too much lag for video or gaming.

 

[londonmystery]

I only need airtunes for music, the express would be used to boost wifi and/or if possible to connect PS3 via ethernet.