Apple AirPort Express Base Station 10/100BASE-T Ethernet WAN port with AirTunes

Reviewed by: tj23678

Duration of ownership:

Strengths: Small, has connectivity not found in most devices. Seems to be made well.

Weaknesses: Installation not intuitive for the average user. Lots of users have useability issues that Apple has not resolved.Appears to use a non-standard optical cable.

Overall Evaluation: I just wanted a way to wirelessly add a kitchen stereo to my living room stereo. And I came across this device, it has optical and mini-jack audio connections. Just what I wanted. Set up was fairly simple, though the manual offers little real information. It took about 30 minutes to get iTunes playing through my kitchen stereo from my windows based notebook. And it doesn't sound bad. I when I run 2 sets of speakers at the same time from my media center PC, I get intermittent pauses in the music. If I run just one set of speakers, no problem. In researching this problem I find a lot of people have this issue. And there is no single fix for it. It involves a lot of trial and error with the various settings available to you, positioning of wires and devices. I've been dinking with this on and off for 3 weeks now without much luck. Other than it's something to do with my media center PC as my notebook doesn't exhibit the issue. All of this means delving into the various devices involved in my system, playing with versions of firmware and drivers. This is not usually something the typical computer user is familiar with. But there's a lot of permutations to try and it will take a while to sort out. Hence only a satisfactory rating. It works great in some situations, but it's not quite ready for primetime.