Griffin Twenty Audio Amplifier for Airport Express hands-on

By Chris Burns/Jan. 11, 2012 4:14 am EST

There's a brand new piece of white technology out there this week, it having a lovely silver dial and the very obvious intent shown right on the surface: this device is made to provide you with untethered digital playback from iTunes with little to no effort at all! This piece of technology works with a Class D stereo amplifier complete with TI PurePath and you've got both S/PDIF optical and an included TOSLINK connector to get you hooked up.

Outputs for this device include Spring-loaded right and left channel connectors as well as an RCA subwoofer connector. Sensitivity can be bumped up to 0.34 dBFS for 20 watts when the volume control is set to max. Power is up at 20 watts per channel into 8 ohms @0.08% THD with both channels driven. Signal to noise ratio is 95 decibels and crosstalk is -71 decibels. If all that makes sense to you – continue on!

You've also got some lovely subwoofer output with both left and right sub-bass audio and autoswitching when your powered subwoofer is detected. Your high-pass filter is 80 Hz 2nd order Linkwitz-Riley applied to L+R channels and your low-pass filter is 80 Hz 2nd order Linkwitz-Riley applied to subwoofer output. Plug it in and get your wireless audio on.