Thanks, Michael - I hadn't seen that before. I'd be curious to see how they are putting both analog and optical digital in the same port. I guess the optical emitter is tucked in at the base of the 3.5mm port.

That's exactly how they do it. The plug portion of the cable is about an 1/8" longer than a regular analog plug and the tip of the plug exposes the optical fiber to the device. I first saw one of these jacks in a portable minidisc recorder and have seen them on a few other devices as well.

Yeah, my 10 year old minidisc recorder has one. I used to have a portable CD player that you could connect to the MD with a little fiber cable, just hit play on the CD, record on the MD, and the MD would convert the PCM stream to ATRACS, put in chapter marks at all the song breaks automaticallly and everything. It was pretty cool.

BB

I'm using the Roku Soundbridge. http://www.rokulabs.com/products/soundbridge/index.php
I send the audio information by wireless, (using Belkin Pre-N Router) to the Roku. It recieves the signal on a Flash B wireless PC card. Sounds great!!! Works well with Comcast Rhapsody Radio Plus which transfers the songs at cd quality. Jim

I'm another huge fan of the Airport Express, I love iTunes on OSX & Windows, and have a ALAC (apple lossless) archive on a linux box. Run a toslink into the 990, and, like Michael Moore says above, you get a 44.1kHz (native CD) signal, with no goofy re-sampling to 48kHz like nearly all other computer digital audio-outs give you (I'm guessing the 990s USB port resamples to 48kHz, anyone know for sure?).

If you have a WRT54G, you can run the AE in WDS (wireless bridging) with a 3rd party firmware upgrade for the Linksys. WDS is another reason why the Airport Express is such a killer piece of equipment for $129. It lets you use the AE as a completely transparent standalone (no ethernet needed!) wifi range extender. It also functions like as a network print server for a USB printer - or you can run a infrared remote into that USB port to control iTunes from your stereo remote.

Rob

I'm thinking about getting an Ipod.

Will the same USB cable that I use to connect my laptop to the 990 work with an Ipod?

An iPod's cable uses a proprietary connector at the iPod end, so you can't use a standard USB cable. A standard cable may work between a computer and an iPod docking cradle, but I haven't used one to be certain of that.

Oh, and just to be sure we're all on the same page, you can't connect an iPod to the 990's USB input. You can connect an ipod with an analog cable. I've connected the headphone output of my iPod to the 990's tape input, although I'm told you can get better sound quality by bypassing the iPod's headphone amp (which requires a cradle to get direct access to the analog signal produced by the iPod's DAC).

Thanks Gonk.