«Not bad but not stunning either»
It works OK and has the nice Airtunes feature (allows you to stream audio from your Mac gadget to the router which has an headphones jack) which however only works with iTunes. Also the setup utility is a bit cumbersome. Definitely prefer a web based interface. The USB only supports a printer so no HDD can be hooked up. There's a number of better and cheaper routers out there but they ain't Apple ;)
[Saturday, November 22, 2008]
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«Amazing!»
Music used to be a huge part of my life; I almost always had something playing on the stereo. Then we moved to a larger house, and it seemed like the music stopped. Our nicest stereo was in the living room. Our CD collection was upstairs, though some of it was on the computer in the office. And we spent most of our time in other parts of the house. It's long been a dream of mine to play the same music throughout the house; with the Airport Express, this dream became a reality, and I'm listening to music all of the time again.
I bought one to give it a try; this let me stream music from my Vista PC to the living room stereo on the same floor (while still playing via the PC speakers). I was hooked, and immediately copied the rest of our CDs to the computer.
After a few weeks, I bought another AirPort Express to stream the music to a pair of powered speakers upstairs (Creative Labs GigaWorks T40 Premium 2.0 Multimedia Speaker System with BasXPort Technology). All three music sources (the computer and the two Airport Express-connected speaker systems) are always in sync and drop outs have been very rare. It's really quite amazing; you can walk throughout the house and hear the same music everywhere. Of course you want to be able to control the music from where you are in the house, so I bought an Apple iPod touch 8 GB (2nd Generation) to use as a remote (the iPhone works as well). The whole setup is just so cool!
I recently bought a third Airport Express. I don't stream music through this one; I use it as a wireless bridge to allow an old iMac without a wireless card to access my network. This one performs flawlessly; you set it up and forget it. I could also stream music through this one if I had another pair of speakers to connect to it.
Although I think this is an amazing product, I almost docked it one star because the setup and interoperability with non-Apple hardware isn't as seamless as it should be.
I connected my first two Airport Expresses to a non-Apple Wireless G access point (a 2WIRE DSL router). For security reasons, I do not broadcast the SSID on my wireless network. I could not get the AirPort Expresses to join my network with the SSID broadcast off (even though I typed in the network name); I had to broadcast the SSID, join them to the network, then stop broadcasting the SSID. That wasn't that big of deal, but it took me at least 30 minutes to figure it out and it's not how it should work. These units also had a tendency to drop out of the AirPort utility software when they connected via this access point.
When I got the third one, I bought an Apple AirPort Extreme Base Station (Gigabit) MB053LL/A to use as my main access point (these can't act as a bridge on a non-Apple wireless network). I set this up as Wireless-N only, I still use the old access point for B/G.
The third AirPort Express also had setup problems- the AirPort Utility software couldn't communicate with it until I did a factory reset. After the factory reset, it was easy as pie, though. I had no problems joining the AirPort Expresses to the Apple base station, even with the SSID broadcast turned off. So, in my experience, these do work with non-Apple access points, but they work much better with an Apple base station. On the plus side, the AirPort Utility works well under Windows; I don't think you need a Mac to get the most out of this.
Those minor hassles aside, this is the most impressive computing/home entertainment product that I've seen in a long time- it's somewhat expensive, but you get a lot of features for your money. Highly Recommended!
[Friday, November 21, 2008]
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«Simple, clean, functional, Apple.»
I have 3 Airport Expresses in my home with which I stream my music to multiple speakers through iTunes. This is one of the main features of the Airport Express and it works flawlessly. If you are a Mac/iTunes user and want a way to "party-up" your house with continuous music from room to room, this is the way to go. It's easy to use, much less expensive than a Sonos system, and these units are great to travel with if you need to make a quick wireless network.
[Wednesday, November 19, 2008]
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