Talk about a sledgehammer to crack a nut. A hundred quid to send audio to the other side of the room using proprietary software? You’re all having a giraffe.

Bluetooth adapter for the laptop, I posted a link earlier but lets go for a posh one, ten quid. There are cheaper ones, you just need one which supports A2DP.

Bluetooth receiver (first one I fell over on Amazon), tenner:

Bosh. Quarter of the price of an Airport and no need for fruit-based software.

what about one of these Neet boxes. Other brands are available.

Talk about a sledgehammer to crack a nut. A hundred quid to send audio to the other side of the room using proprietary software? You’re all having a giraffe.

Bluetooth adapter for the laptop, I posted a link earlier but lets go for a posh one, ten quid. There are cheaper ones, you just need one which supports A2DP.

Bluetooth receiver (first one I fell over on Amazon), tenner:

Bosh. Quarter of the price of an Airport and no need for fruit-based software.

You need a decent quality DAC to obtain decent sound quality from Bluetooth, which will be expensive. The Airport Express is also a good quality DAC.

Also Bluetooth is lossy, and not networked

Chromecast + hdmi audio extractor, all for 40 quid.. Job jobbed. That way no Bluetooth audio loss, and you get compatability with various Google stuff thrown in..

An alternative to Airport Express though I have no idea whether or not it’s as ‘plug n play’…

Walk away from airport express….utterly useless. Apple store “Genius”couldn’t even get them to work. They thought there were transformers to start with though.
Seriously don’t bother with Airport Express.
Get a Sonos bridge. much better.

airport express, excellent bit of kit, allows you to stream in the digital domain and use an external dac if you plug in an optical cable, it’s internal dac is good just not as good as a standalone HiFi Dac.

Walk away from airport express….utterly useless. Apple store “Genius”couldn’t even get them to work.

Erm, yeah. I just plugged mine in and 30 seconds later everything working fine and has been ever since.

As you say, useless