Airport Express

The Air­port Express I ordered last month arrived yesterday.

After 2+ hours of fid­dling, googling, plug­ging and unplug­ging, I’ve finally got Karen O and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs stream­ing from my Powerbook’s iTunes, to my Onkyo receiver and Cam­bridge Sound­works speakers.

The prob­lem was to get my $60 Net­gear router to rec­og­nize the AX  — as the doc­u­men­ta­tion makes no promises of con­nect­ing to a third-​party wire­less router, (on a side note, I’ve never under­stood the pric­ing of the orig­i­nal Air­port Extreme — at $200, what advan­tages could this model pos­si­bly offer over any other IEEE 802.11g router?). Expect­ing it to plug-​in and work, like all my Apple gear, I became increas­ingly frus­trated with that blink­ing amber light (which tells you there is a prob­lem, but pro­vides no other details).

After search­ing around in vain, I stum­bled across this thread on the Apple forums: AX: Switch­ing between Client and Net­work ? — and cjb65 points out that all you have to do is place a “$” before the 128-bit WEP key, when you set up the network… and pow! it works… Although, I’ve yet to get it to extend the range of my pri­mary net­work. The AX is merely acting as a “client” now.

It sounds good, how­ever, there are some “cons” to report:

• AX bypasses my Volume Logic iTunes plugin, (which nor­mally improves the qual­ity of play­back quite a bit). I’m not too happy about that, though per­haps this will be ironed out in the future.

• I wish that the AX streamed all audio to my stereo, not merely music from iTunes.

Still, now that is stream­ing well enough, I’m impressed. I can’t wait to take it on the road, and use it as a portable wire­less net­work. Now, if only my cell phone could browse the web…