A few years ago I found myself at an audio crossroads. I had just spent 2 years gutting and rebuilding my house and now had a brand new apartment with in-ceiling speakers/volume controls in my kitchen, bedroom and of course the bathroom and a 7.1 Channel Home Theater in my living room. At the same time I had a huge hard drive with enough music to play for a year and a half straight. The issue, of course, was to get that sweet music through that mass of speakers in an efficient and user friendly manner and in a way that would also make my cochlea purr with joy.

It is amazing how far we have come since then. If you were to ask me that question right now I could probably give you 20 different answers but back then much of the home digital audio integration was just in its infancy. Tell you the truth, in those 2 or so years I have probably implemented 5 different alternatives to the same problem.

I started off by simply plugging an old laptop, which sat on top of one of my speakers, directly into my stereo. This worked well but the geek in me had a hankering to be able to control my music from anywhere in the house and this wasn’t going to cut it.

The purchase of the Slim Device was next. At the time, this little LCD screen with it’s web-based music controller was the answer to all my problems. It allowed me to control my music from anywhere and even better had a built in streaming server that let me stream my music to any computer with a browser and an internet connection. I was very impressed.

Then I got myself an iPod and things with the Slim Device began to go awry. Since ID3 tags (you know the information like Artist/Song/Album/Genre that show up on you music players) are essential to the iPod and it’s interface, I wanted to find a place where I could manage my tags and play all of my music. The issue with the Slim Device was that it used a different version of the ID3 tags than my new player, iTunes, so I was being forced to clean multiple types of tags in order for all of my players to display then correctly. This was obviously not going to work. I knew I needed to have iTunes run the show. That is when I got my hands on an old Apple G4.

The G4 was a great find. I got it free from a friend and it was ready to become my media center before I even picked it up. Not only was I able to play my music but I also had the video output connected to my HDTV which allowed me to watch DVD’s, music video, or surf the web on a great 46″ monitor. Talk about a way to get the chicks riled up. Anyways, there were a few drawbacks to this setup. The sound out of the machine was a bit noisy and I had to control the thing using a remote desktop solution called realVNC. It just wasn’t my ultimate solution, but it was cool for the time being. I of course desired something more.

Then, 2 days after bashing Apple for their poor handling of M3U play lists, they handed me the solution I had been yearning for . Apple’s Airport Express is a little, simple, wireless piece of hardware that you plug into any wall socket, then plug into the back of your audio receiver and then begin enjoying high quality streaming music controlled from any computer running iTunes on your network. I am blown away by the sound quality compared to the G4 configuration and the 15 minute setup time is unreal. Whether you have a wireless or Ethernet based network, the device comes with the ability to integrate with both. Even better is that if you don’t have a wireless network yet, you can plug your internet connection directly into the device, use it as a router and create one. Not bad for something that only costs $129.

So here’s to Apple for doing what they do best; producing ingenious and solid hardware products.

Enjoy.