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jmufellow

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jun 17, 2005
215
0
This has been bugging me for a while. Does anyone know if there is any quality degradation when playing music thru airport express than just plugging it into the computer? I have tried to test this myself to no avail, because in the time it takes to switch, I forget what it originally sounded like.
 
From what I recall, Airtunes shoots it across as lossless, so there shouldn't be any quality loss apart from the original MP3 file.



Here's to the Crazy Ones
 
crazydreaming said:
So have we concluded here that I'm better off hooking my speakers up to the airport (not optical) as opposed as directly to my Powerbook?


Yes and no...

See... The port on the airport is balanced so that the reciever gets the sounds as it 'expects' it to be. By pluggin it directly into the computer's port, it not treated as such, and is more suspectable to audio artifacts and such, but really it won't sound 'bad', just not as good :) . But then again, its more convinient to control all of the audio using the KB...
 
jmufellow said:
I have tried to test this myself to no avail, because in the time it takes to switch, I forget what it originally sounded like.

If you can't tell the difference, doesn't that kind of make it a moot issue?

I've been using airtunes for a while and it sounds great to me....at least on my system.
 
Kobushi said:
If you can't tell the difference, doesn't that kind of make it a moot issue?

I've been using airtunes for a while and it sounds great to me....at least on my system.

yeah, i agree. Unless you are an audiophile and have good quality monitor so you can actually hear the difference it is really pointless to even mess with it.
 
Kobushi said:
If you can't tell the difference, doesn't that kind of make it a moot issue?

I've been using airtunes for a while and it sounds great to me....at least on my system.
To clarify, I couldn't tell doing a side by side comparison because once I switched to airport from computer, plugged the minijack to the computer, started the song and adjusted the volume (the volume is louder when on airport), it was hard to do an objective comparison. But to be honest, it probably is a moot issue anyway cause I'm no audiophile.:eek: Just one of those things that has bothered me 'cause I didn't know if I was missing anything.
 
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