Shanghai Yummy

When I read about the Airport Express a few months ago, I was pretty excited about it. In fact, I was so excited by the idea that I almost went out and picked one up right away. Imagine my disappointment when I went to the Apple Store only to be told that they weren't in stock yet.

The intervening months have seen my old n' busted Linksys 802.11b router die (what's up with this stuff only lasting two years or so?) and the acquisition of a Buffalo 802.11g router instead of an Airport Express. This is because, well, it wasn't my choice. That's probably all the information I should give here. Yeah. Let's just leave it at that.

Well, recently, I've needed to extend the range of that Buffalo router, and getting an external antenna, while it helped slightly, didn't resolve the issue completely. So I sucked it up and used this as an excuse to check out the Airport Express. Now, as I've said many times before, I tend to use technology in ways that, let's just say, aren't mainstream.

I imagine that the vast majority of people hook up their Airport Expresses to their stereo, and to a cable modem or DSL modem via the ethernet port, and maybe a printer. I would guess that the majority of AXP's stand alone in a wireless network. Maybe a much smaller minority use their AXP's to connect to an existing Airport Extreme network, anchored by a previously purchased Airport Extreme Base Station. A much smaller minority of *those* people, in turn, may use their AXP to actually extend their Airport network using the WDS (Wireless Distribution System) feature. This is, unfortunately, not a part of the 802.11 spec, so every manufacturer purportedly does it a little differently. Apple seems to have made it a pretty easy process, as long as you're using all Apple base stations... Looking through the Airport Express Setup Assistant, as well as the more robust Airport Admin Utility, it seems they've made it pretty self-explanatory, and they seem to have made it so that the software could discover the necessary settings with minimal user intervention.

However, in my case, which is the extreme (pardon the pun) minority of cases, I was trying to extend an existing non-Apple wireless network. The process was somewhat painful, though I was glad to see that several people had put up helpful websites to help others through the process. Due to being a bit of a stickler on security (yeah, I know, security and wireless just don't really belong in the same sentence, but I try anyway), the process took all night. It got a little better once I found those websites, but for a while I was kind of shooting in the dark, just making some settings changes to the AXP, then the Buffalo, and back and forth, until something almost worked...

In any case, after I got the thing to finally work the way I wanted to, I'm pretty satisfied thus far. The range extension is definitely working well, and though our network is a little less secure (WEP instead of WPA, since WDS doesn't support WPA), I can now print to my LaserJet on multiple machines, Windows and Mac, without having to dedicate a machine to serve it, and of course I now have the power of AirTunes!

This whole AirTunes thing pretty much rocks. The music actually sounds better than if I just hook up my PowerBook or iPod to the analog inputs on my Acurus. I attribute this to the fact that I'm feeding the digital stream into the sweet Burr-Brown DACs in the Acurus. A good DAC makes such a huge difference in the sound. Even though the stream is coming from compressed mp3's or AAC files, and then being transmitted as AAC Lossless, then being decoded and upsampled to the 44.1 kHz PCM, they seem to have done a pretty good job of maintaining stream integrity throughout the process.

My only two complaints are that the price is pretty high for that audio connection kit. I mean, dude... three cables, one of which you'll probably not use, $40? Yeah, yeah, I know, it's the Monster Cable mystique. Whatever. The whole thing would definitely have been worth it for the $129 price tag of just the base station. The fact that three cables cost about a third as much as that base station is... ridiculous at best. Oh well, this is guy that has more than a grand sunk into audio cables over the years... so I probably don't have a right to complain. The other complaint is really directed at the IEEE. I mean, why not make WDS part of the standard? This nonsense with futzing around with the settings all night could have been easily alleviated if the spec had called on manufacturers to standardize. As far as I'm concerned, the lack of WDS inclusion makes the 802.11 spec incomplete.

But overall, a good product, and so far I'm quite satisfied.

PGP Signed Entry