PottedPlant

At a website for some audio store I saw a photo of an AudioEngine A5 speaker with an Airport Express plugged into the speaker's AC outlet. The AE was connected to the speaker via the RCA mini jack. That uses the AE's DAC, right? Wouldn't you get better sound by connecting the AE to an external DAC and connecting the DAC to the speaker's mini jack? Or are A5s too low end for it to matter?

Wow, thank you all so much for taking the time to give those answers. I will investigate all of that. The iPod Touch/Remote/iTunes/Mini piece is already decided. The house is well wired so the Airport Expresses will use ethernet rather than wireless to connect to the Mini. They don't have to be AE as long as iTunes can control them. The Airplay speakers out there now don't look like they are very high quality so I haven't given them serious consideration.

I've been through CA Academy and browsed the forums but I'm still stuck on what needs to go between an Airport Express using TOSLink and a set of speakers. I understand the DA process is necessary, but the DACs I've seen appear to be designed to hand the analog signal to yet another component such as a reciever, amp, or preamp and none of those components that I've seen have DACs or TOSLink inputs built in. My goal is to have only the speakers in view and control them with only an IPOD Touch and avoid having a stack of components in each AE zone. Is there such a quality device that takes care of all the functions between the bit-perfect AE TOSLink output and a good set of speakers?