Another interesting old bit of Apple tech I have laying about here at home; the Gen1 Airport Express.
Before the Apple TV, if you wanted to pipe iTunes to your stereo on the other side of the room, you needed one of these – which is why I bought this one back in 2004.
Unlike a lot of the other older Apple stuff I have cluttering up my house, this no longer works with modern hardware… Well, it still mechanically works just fine, you just need an early 2000’s Mac to connect to it and configure it.
Fortunately, I have a few of those. 🙂
Interestingly these had pretty good analog sound quality due to the TI Burr-Brown DAC they used, and with Apple Lossless (ALAC) and using TOSLink (that headphone jack also houses a laser for fiber optic use) the output was 1:1 to the original CD – over wireless!
It was pretty cutting edge stuff in 2004.
I used this with a Sony SAVA 500 home theater setup, which was also pretty good for someone without a zillion dollars to spend.
These days it’s all about the Apple TV, which has enough CPU grunt internally to run its own network connections and Apple Music application. And everything is ALAC now…
Listening to "Who Can It Be Now?" by Men At Work