The Chicken Coop

Leonie and I have been having a bit of a clean out, as we have both posted about before. The TV and VCR are gone; the Media Centre box is in the boot of the car, waiting for me to grab it and send it back to Microsoft; and a very poorly constructed cupboard is now very very dead:

((nearly) before and after)

With all of that gone, the largest wall in the lounge is now free to be used as a projector screen – cue Dr Who episode on a 5 foot screen. All good.

Also added to the mix (as a result of selling the other stuff) is an Apple Airport Express. This is rather than putting in the SONOS system, and it’s because of two reasons:

• We have a 80sqm house. It’s really not that big a deal walking from end to end!
• The SONOS base price is $3000 NZ. The AirPort Express was $250. The difference is almost a MacBook

Now, first up, I’m still extremely impressed with the SONOS. It’s a great system, and for a house which is larger than ours (eg, with two floors), it would be perfect. But we are two people in a two bedroom house. A large-scale multi-room system is kinda overkill. Enter the AirPort Express:

The AirPort is a small WiFi base station, but it also has the advantage of having an audio-out socket on the bottom (and a USB plug for printer sharing). If you need to, it can also connect to a cable or DSL modem, and act as a full router/gateway/nat box etc. Size-wise, it’s a little bigger than an iPod.

We have it setup next to the stereo in the lounge, and music gets streamed from one of the laptops in the office. The sound quality is outstanding, and installation couldn’t have been easier. Well, it could have been easier if I’d remembered my WEP key, but thats not really Apple’s fault .

Plug device in. Wait for the light to flash amber, fire up the software, configure it (nothing major – join existing network, enter WEP key, done), wait for it to go green (once it connects to the network), then just set iTunes to send stuff to it. There is even a Windows and Mac app (AirFoil) which allows any audio source to be pushed to it.

If we had an Apple base station, we could use it as a wireless extender (using WDS) – but we don’t, and as I said – we can get wireless from anywhere in the house (or the garden), so it’s not really an issue. For what we wanted – which is an easy, simple, reliable method of getting music into the lounge without having a PC there – this is perfect. Cheers to Magnum Mac for having it in stock and being willing for me to bring it back if it all went pear-shaped.

All up, this is one of the better bits of tech I’ve bought in a while – along with the iPod Nano and the Tivoli. I’d definitely recommend one if you are in a similar situation to us.