billjensen

I did the same yesterday, using some of the reward certificates, and then getting a $15 card for the purchase over $100. It will give a poor man's intro to a decent little DAC, even with the 1.2 version being introduced. My grade SR80i's will give it a work out shortly

That may be hard if you have not already purchased it, since the Deepblue is no longer for sale at Peachtree. It is now listed as an archived product. Wonder if they will be coming out with a new version soon

Chris, I saw that Trendnet had a USB 3.0 version of the 802.11ac draft adapter, as does Edimax and Zyxel, the latter are both available at newegg. Are any of these more equal than others? One of the reviews at Newegg had a response from the Edimax support rep indicated that throughput should be 433Mbps maximum. My 2012 Macbook Air models are quite envious of the 2013 versions with 802.11 ac built in.

Chris, very smart to have the analogaudiophile.com domain name already locked down, and directed to this site. I can see the wave of DBX reviews, reel to reel vs cassette discussions, and blogs about the value of "hiss" compared to the music being written shortly. Can you start to publish these on mimeograph sheets soon?

I tried to buy one locally last weekend but the dealer (who is listed on the HRT website) no longer carries HRT. I am also considering the modi/magni combo from Schiit, but the microStreamer would be more laptop friendly for me. Please share your experience with it once received. Thanks Bill

my granddaughter will soon be 1 year old, and her amazing growth during this year reminds me of how precious those early days and months are as a dad, assuming you get any sleep! Congrats Bill

I am not sure if the Airport Extreme base station has more range, but I would believe its antenna would be more effective than the express. Again, they have the base stations as refurbs at the apple store web site. You may prefer to find a cheaper "N" router from another brand ( I have used netgears and others for example) but the apple base stations have been very reliable. Another suggestion with regard to your current range--you may want to move the express around a bit, or perhaps change the channel in case of interference. The base station has a USB port, but it is only for printers or hard drives. You may want to connect a usb hard drive to the base station to house your iTunes library, or be a backup to your iTunes library. I have a hard drive connected to mine, and use Time Machine for backups of my multiple macs.

Is the airport express your only wireless connection, or do you have another wireless router that connects to the express? You may want to try using a regular airport extreme router as it may have better range, and then you could connect an apple TV, mini or whatever to the extreme. From the sound of your budget, I think a mini would fit your needs better in the second room, headless, and indeed screen sharing would work with both the iMac and an ipod touch for remote control. You may also want to hold off a bit to see if the iPad would fit as a remote too, albeit much larger. You leave the mini on all the time, turn off the sleep mode, and you can open up multiple apps, including iTunes, and any other app that you would want to run on it, or control it from the iMAC or a macbook. You may want to keep your eye on the refurb section of the apple store--minis pop up there every so often, and macbooks are almost always there. the refurbs have the same warranty as new, and you can add applecare for an extended warranty.

since you mentioned you wanted to conserve funds, I would opt for a mini. You can keep an eye on the apple store refurb section, as mini's come up from time to time (although not as often as macbooks). As I wrote this, there was a mini refurb available at the apple store. But some of the macbook refurbs at the apple store do have firewire, so keep that in mind. dealmac.com is another site to keep an eye on various sales. You could run the mini as a headless mac, if you just borrowed someone's monitor. there is a nice thread here at this site, plus others, on how to set that up. pick up a cheap firewire drive, and use that as a boot drive for the old powerbook-- with screen sharing on the mini you could easily control the mini from the powerbook without having to keep a monitor around. And if you *really* want to conserve funds, keep an eye at your local craig's list. You can at times find some nice deals.