Help with Mac Mini setup

[aarons]

Hello. This is a newbie question I'm afraid.

 

I currently have a Quad CDP-2, 99 preamp and Quad 909 power amp. The CDP-2 can take a digital signal in (Toslink only). I would like to set up a relatively cheap and easy system to serve music to the CDP-2 and was thinking of a Mac Mini. I had imagined that this system could be:

 

Mac Mini (iTunes, uncompressed files), data sent over wifi network to Airport Express, toslink out of Airport Express to CDP-2.

 

(Some details: I would want to use the Mac Mini as a general computer (although not when listening to music). It would be in another room to the hifi system. I don't listen to high-res files (almost nothing available I would choose to listen to). I don't want to have to fiddle with seven different pieces of software to play a song. The point is meant to be that it's more convenient than using CDs.)

 

This seems simple enough but there seems to be a lot of discussion regarding sound quality issues with wifi networks and the 'noisy' environment of a Mac Mini. I find this a little confusing as until the data gets to the CDP's DAC it's purely digital data and as such the file could just as easily be a word-processing or Excel file, or web page, or whatever. No other kind of data I use has problems being corrupted by the 'noisy' environment of the mac, nor being delivered in anything other than it's perfect, error corrected state, by a wifi network. I happily get web pages to served to me from the other side of the world through scores of routers, across multiple networks and down copper phone wires without any pages being delivered in a corrupted state. Why should it be different with a digital audio file? I also have no problem in getting HD video sent over a wifi network without any drop outs or need for special drives, so also confused about this.

 

Any advice welcome. I'd just like advice on this topic - the Mac Mini - rather than suggestions for other solutions.

 

Thanks!

Aaron

[avta]

I think you would be satisfied with the system you envision. There would of course be a limitation on the types of files you could play due to iTunes/Airport Express limits. I believe 14/48 is the file limit. You could play higher resolution files but they would be down sampled to that form. I've forgotten if it's 14/44 or 14/48 but I'm sure others will clarify this.