AirPort Express w/ AirTunes

Gallery can be found at https://mypersonalgetaway.com/hardware/airport/index.htm

Apple is slowly moving more and more into the digital music revolution. Like Steve Jobs says, “everyone loves music”. He is right. Even the people that hate a lot of things have a favorite band or favorite song of all time. Apple has been cornering the market since their release of iTunes back in 2000 then their iPod in November of 2001. They have added the iTunes Music Store, updated the iPod, added new headphones to their lineup and just recently the release of an inexpensive Wi-Fi base station with the ability to stream music anywhere in your house via iTunes. Airport Express is an Airport Extreme station the size of an Apple notebook power brick with Ethernet, USB and audio ports on the bottom. There is no power cable since you plug the entire brick into the wall. From there, you can browse the internet wirelessly, print via airport to your USB printer and stream music to stereos all over the house and for $130 USD you can afford to buy more than one.

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The packaging is simple, as is all of Apple’s products (see pictures). I plugged the unit into my surround sound speaker system in the living room and walked through the setup process. After installing the Airport Express software from the CD and downloading iTunes 4.6, I setup the base station, named it and set up properties just like you would if you were setting up a normal Airport station. From there, you restart and launch iTunes. In the “Audio” area of iTunes Preferences is a section on Airport Express. Tell iTunes to search for Airport Express networks. Immediately I saw the base station. Sadly, I tried to play music to it and iTunes did not do anything just said, “connecting to base station”. I restarted iTunes and it worked perfectly. The cool thing is, it is so easy to use. I just change the network from “Computer” to “Surround Sound”. If I have another network in my sister’s room, I can wake her up in the morning with Airport and blast some old Queen song right in her ear and that will do the trick.
The CPU usage between playing music through your computer and streaming it is minimal. If you are doing any network things like sharing files between computers, your upload speed will be significantly less over airport but for those just browsing the net, you won’t notice any difference. If you look at the “Airport Status” image in our gallery it shows I am uploading at 300K per second over Airport while AirTunes is in use. That is an extremely high data rate for music but when you hear it, the fidelity is amazing if the original song is encoded at a high rate.
Speaking of sound quality; cross fading, Sound Check, Sound Enhancer and the Equalizer all work over AirTunes. Even my third party VolumeLogic software extension for iTunes works over the airwaves to make my songs sound a hell of a lot better. On my 800Mhz iBook G4 I used 40% of my CPU while streaming music as opposed to 30% before. This is because AirTunes broadcasts with Apple Lossless format. Your computer is encoding music on the fly to send it over the airwaves. Thus the larger amount of data sent and increased CPU use. Apple Lossless is a large sound format similar to AIFF but at half the file size of AIFF but has great sound quality if you import your music in this larger file size format.
Setting up my USB printer was easy so now my Dad’s Gateway and my machines can print to one printer and I can get online from anywhere in my house. The differences between an Airport Extreme Base Station and that of the Airport Express are those that most users will never need and make the lesser price very justifying. For one, there is no modem connection on the Airport Express. This may be troublesome for the 70% of computer users still using Dial-Up. The Modem is only available on the $249 version of the Airport Extreme base station. Another thing is the lack of an antennae port. There are major plusses to having one; most importantly increasing the range of your Airport. Instead Airport Express relies on a technology allowing you to hop from station to station. Similar to what my school does, they have 30 Base stations within 150 feet of each other. You can be loading a web page or downloading a file and as long as the stations all have the same Airport name, you will hope from station to station keeping the same IP address. It is really cool and only one station needs to have Internet hooked up to it. The rest share the network from that one.
One thing AirTunes can’t do is stream music to two locations at once. I believe this has to do with 802.11g’s data rate. As Jason Snell (Editor-in-chief of Macworld Magazine) stated in an article, the human ear can notice the slightest imperfections in sound. When you listen to Airport, there is a millisecond delay between iTunes and the connected speakers across your house. If you have three AirTunes broadcasts running, you will notice the imperfection of each one and slowdowns in the music. Until Airport Extreme goes to a higher bandwidth spectrum, or Apple can get a high fidelity/ lower data rate format, we will most likely be stuck with one stream for now.
The range is equal to an Airport Express base station but the size, portability and price make the Airport Express w/ AirTunes a great value for those on a tight budget or those that want to extend their wireless range. From music, Internet, printers, and other forms of sharing al in the smallest Wi-Fi station ever it is well worth it. An Apple made Airport station for $129 USD? I’ll talk two.