Hi-
I was curious if you had played at all with the Musical Fidelity gear. I've got a system set up tunneling iTunes to AE to Toslink to DAC(MF TriVista)/stero and I love it. The Toslink obviously smoked the miniplug option out of the AE. I don't have a jitter correction device in the signal path, but have been more than pleased.
My reference standard has been my Musical Fidelity A5 CD player which is virtually matched by my AE/DAC solution, despite the source musical being stored in 192kbps and 256kpbs MP3 files. I thought it was better than pretty darn good. I'm not sure I want to move up to Apple Lossless encoding because of the storage overhead with that solution for the time being. But I am curious to hear your thoughts. Thanks so much in advance.
Cheers,
-Pete
Apple Macbook Pro 15" 2.5GHz (4GB RAM/500GB HD)
running OS 10.5.6 and iTunes 8.1
Airport Extreme N Basestation
Airport Express Basetation
Sony Optical Cable
Musical Fidelity TriVista DAC
Nordost Blue Heaven Interconnects
NAD 1700 Preamp
Nordost Blue Heaven Interconnects
NAD 2700 Power Amp
Monster Cable
DALI Helicon 400 MkIs
Belkin PureAV Home Theater Power Console PF60