IMac hooked up to my Hi Fi receiver

I noticed loss of quality when using an extra long length of RCA cable. 15 feet does does not seem excessively long, but you might try going as far as possible with a mini-stereo jack extension cable (the type you buy to make your headphones cable longer), and then covert to RCA at the far end using an adapter that goes from mini-stereo jack to the pair of RCA connectors with a typical 3-foot or shorter cable. That worked better for me.

Mopito,

What I would recommend is to get an Airport Express and send your music wirelessly to your receiver. There is a feature in the Airport Express called Air Tunes that is designed to do just that, I've been doing it for over a year and it's awesome. The AEX is available for about $85.00 if you shop for it and can be used to either set up a seperate network or join and existing network and takes about 5 minutes to set up. You will need a different cable to connect the AEX to your receiver, if you have an optical input on your receiver (very very common!) you connect that to the AEX with a cable like this.

Hope this helps a bit!

Regards,

Roger

I totally second rkaufmann here.

If you want good music quality, you need to use the optical output. Either from the Mac directly (you can use fairly long toslink (optical digial) cables without loss) or stream the music to an airport express and use toslink from there.

However, with 15 ft, an optical digital cable (like rkaufmann showed in his link) is zero problem, you could use these even with 50 ft.

What you do with the toslink signal then depends on your amp. If it has an optical input, you're fine. Long cable, nothing more to worry about and you'll have the best input quality your amp can get.

If it has a normal copper digital input (called sp-dif) you can buy an optical to spdif converter. They are cheap but won't cause loss in quality. Obviously you'll use a long optical cable and attach the sp-dif converter to the amp.

If your amp is just analog (standard cinch input pairs) buy a DAC (d/a converter) of your choice. They start around $25 and go up to $10,000 ... so you just choose.

The good thing with toslink is that if there's no music data, there'll be no signal, so there'll be no background static noise.

Message was edited by: Shimodax

This one is a decent thing (I have that at home to hook an AirportExpress into my Stereo): http://www.audiocircle.com/index.php?topic=73347.0 (you'll need two 6.5mm headphone to cinch adaptors for the output)

Those look decent too (the 2nd looks rather small and can be hid behind your amp). I don't know either myself, but I somehow like the small one, because it has a decent converter chip and can be hidden behind the amp:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=370295071967
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=260512243085

If you want to spend more (probably worth it if your iMac is your primary source of music) I've only heard the best about this one, but it will probably only make sense if your receiver/amp itself is in the $1000+ ballpark:
http://www.computeraudiophile.com/Cambridge-Audio-DacMagic-Review

If your receiver/amp does have an spdif digital-in (i.e. just coax digital but not optical digital) a simple converter like this will do:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=220527598143 (but really only if the amp has an spdif port)

When you buy the toslink cable, make sure it has one long and one short nose (as in the link Roger posted above).