The following is posted in the 990 FAQ:

Q. What is the USB jack used for?

A. The USB jack on the rear panel serves two important functions. First, it may be used for connection to compatible computers (Windows 98ME and above) to act as an "audio slave device" so that the playback of audio streams from your computer may be heard through your home theater system.


Could anyone elaborate on this? Does this mean that I can connect a laptop to the 990 with a USB cable and play music from .mp3 or .wma files on the laptop?

Today if I double-click the .wma file the music is heard from the laptop speaker or to headphones if it's plugged in. Is the music somehow redirected to the 990 by virtue of a cable just being plugged into the USB port? Something else must be happening.

We'll have to wait until somebody tries this out (or until we have a manual in hand that describes how to set it up) to know for sure, but I've read it to mean that the 990 can be connected to a PC (or Mac?) via USB and the 990 can become a sort of "big honkin' sound card" for the computer. For what it's worth, the P-965's manual indicates that the USB port's audio support is limited to PCM stereo.

When you "hot plug" the USB cable into a computer Windows will auto-detect a USB Audio CODEC being attached to the computer and will search for and install a Windows USB audio driver.

After the USB driver has been install you select USB Audio CODEC as the output sound device from within your multimedia player to decode and send stereo PCM audio to the USB post on the preamp.

A very nice feature. I hope Windows "plug and play" and the 990 work with each other properly.

What will control the volume, the PC or the 990?

Expect to have volume control on both ends. You will need to use your PC and applicable software to send the PCM audio to the 990, so your software volume settings will come into play ( although I can't say what the USB driver may do here). The only way the 990 wouldn't control volume is if they configured the port with a bypass setting (very unlikely AFAIK), you'll deal with that as well.

Let's hope Outlaw has made this pretty idiot-proof (a changed setting on the computer is all it takes to blow up some hardware). The USB connection is something that's been on the drawing board/test bed for a couple of years at Outlaw with their RR2150, so my expectations are high. We can only wait for the manual to find out for sure.

Though we'll have to wait for definitive specs, there is the possibility that you could use a USB wireless connector at the 990 and hook into an existing wirelsss network to transmit PC stored music. I'm just not sure what player software would be needed at the PC.

Right now I do this sort of thing (though not exactly since the 950 is USB-less) with the Apple airport express which connects wirelessly to my home network and conects to my 950 with a Toslink connector. This allows me to access all stored music (I recently sent off 250 CD's and had a compnay convert them to digital format and put them on DVD's that I then loaded onto a hard drive)

It allows me to play my whole PC library through iTunes software. Recent reviews also test this sound as extremely good. Notwithstanding the issues with compression. (May 2005 Stereophile mag)

We are in agreement about that. I use an express hooked into both of my audio systems, it's a very cheap and effective alternative to $$$ whole house music systems. Not to mention that iTunes' highest quality rip setting (using lossless compression) is virtually indistinguishable from the original material.

For those of us using the express, the 990's USB input would best function as a firmware upgrade tool (unless you're keen on connecting your mac to your system locally). Unfortunately, the proprietary airport express firmware doesn't allow the USB connection to be used for anything other than a printer - it's a nice thought, though, to upgrade a 990 from anywhere in the house!

I don't think I'm stepping too far out of bounds by definitively saying that you won't be able to hook up a USB wireless adapter to the 990. The 990 is a USB device, not a USB host. USB is a "master-slave" sort of bus, where there must always be a host ("master") to communicate with a device ("slave"). USB audio devices and USB wireless devices are both devices, and require connection to a host (e.g. a PC) to function.

Yes, there is USB On-The-Go, which allows device-device connections, and there are also embedded USB hosts which can allow devices (e.g. a digital camera) to control another device (e.g. a printer) with no PC in between. Judging by the fact that the connector is a type "B" connector, it is most probably just a device. USB OTG uses a new connector type, and embedded hosts typically have type "A" connectors and act only as hosts.

You are correct that the 990 would certainly not work with a USB wireless adapter. The airport express, though, is technically a wireless bridge or router depending upon configuration (acts as a print server), which makes it a master unit and not a slave. By this token, with the appropriate coding I assumed that such communication with the 990 would be possible, but that is purely speculation on my part.

My earlier post does read like the express' USB port is viable for upgrades, though, don't it? I was thinking of using the USB connection in terms of directly to my PowerBook (laptop), which of course I can connect temporarily as needed. Those with G5s won't have that luxury. Thanks for noting the error on my part.

Don't know if this helps, but I have a USB wireless adapter plugged into my Tivo series II, which allows it to connect to my wireless router and download the programming guide. I can also stream media to my Tivo this way.
The 990 would have to have a driver or something built-in to do this, as I had to plug my Tivo into a regular phone line after I bought it, in order to get it to dail up to Tivo Central and download the latest firmware to allow the wireless networking to function.