Thanks Soundproof,

I'm not shure how you mean different soundcard?

The Mac mini don't have any exchangeable parts, right?

BTW, the BS9000 is outputting a 16bit/44khz signal to the Beolab 5's, right? And then upsampling it to 24bit/192khz?

> Only the Beolab 5.

okay, but is this only the case for the solution you talk about or is this the case in general? .. or let me then put it differently .. say one has a pair of beolab 8000s .. is there anyway to connect them to an ATV/Mac mini without having the B&O stereo in between? or is the B&O stereo mandatory? I mean, the loudspeakers have their own amp, so shouldn't it be possible?

jesper 

I'm not sure how one would deal with the on/off trigger and volume control...

Perhaps someone else can answer your question? 

I don't know how it performs, but people seem satisfied. I have used this one, which is bi-directional, and gives you more inputs/outputs:

 

As bayerische points out, the job is then to deal with the proper on-off and volume control. But I have used various DACs for that, with excellent results, connecting a B&O plug-to-RCA cable to the speakers, and then the RCA-jack to the DAC.

I am presently using a Grace m902 DAC together with my BL3s, for instance, and controlling the volume with the DAC (which also has a remote control). You could connect this to any speakers.

The trouble with connecting directly to the speakers from the minijack out from a computer, for instance, would be one of controlling the signal surge (and impedance "scratching" when connecting) to the speakers, and it's kind of cumbersome to have to unplug the speakers every time, to protect them.
But if you can establish a dedicated circuit, then you can send a digital signal to the DAC, and then send the analog signal from that to any B&O speaker, while using the DAC to control volume, etc. And when you switch off the DAC, the speakers soon go into standby.

256-Kbps AAC " equal to "Lossless"?

No, it's not. One distinguishes between lossy and lossless compression, and 256kbps is a lossy format.

Lossy formats degrade the fidelity of the original signal by removing "inaudible" content; lossless formats preserve all the information on the original signal, even while reducing the size of the original file.

You need to use Apple Lossless to achieve true lossless quality, i.e. the same information that was on the disk, but in a compressed format.

256 kbps AAC is a nudge in the direction of 320kbps, which many claim you can not distinguish from CD-resolution with 99% of all the music you listen to.

A lossless file will run from 480 - 900 kbps, where the original 16/44.1 runs at 1411.2 kbps.

It is fair to note that Dave Moulton, here in the forum, has expressed strong satisfaction with the quality of the AAC compression algorithm from Apple. The bigger your file, the more processing it requires - and if you want to place music on an iPod, in addition to having it available on your server, you may have to create a lossless and a compressed library of the music. An iPod's battery will run down faster the more processing it has to do, and while lossless files will play on iPods, they do so at the cost of battery life.

I would have my portable computer as my iPhone music hub, and the Mac mini as a lossless hub for the Beolab 5's.

But can I buy lossless via iTunes? Or is AAC the best currently available?

Somewhere I read about somekind of "restriction" to the Apple TV, that it wouldn't really be able to output "lossless" quality...?

The Apple TV is very interesting to me, but I don't want something that can't output lossless.

I buy a lot of CD's, and the CD's I would physically buy, I would rip at lossless quality, I think I could live with the AAC from the "relatively few" CD I would buy directly of iTunes.