I have a MacBook Pro for work/school. I've recently added a bluetooth keyboard and mouse to my office so that when I dock my MBP, I can sit comfortably and use it like a desktop.

That leaves me with 2 wires: Power (Which I can't really get rid of, ) and my speakers cord.

My first thought was finding bluetooth speakers. Do any decent quality/powerful ones exist? I fear that either they are very expensive, or BT simply doesn't offer enough bandwidth to stream music.

Another option was the airport express (maybe a bit more economical financially?). Could I hook my speakers up directly to the APE, then set iTunes to always stream via Wifi?

Yep, you sure can. If you use something like Rogue Amoeba - Airfoil: Send Any Audio to the AirPort Express, you can stream any sound from your Mac regardless of application it's coming from and have it play out from your Airport Express.

if you have a good amplifier & speaker set up in yout home, look into Sonos Digital Music System to stream digital music wirelessly from PC to any speakers in your home
wireless and brilliant.

If you want all system sounds played externally (i.e. like external speakers, only without wires) then Airfoil with AirPort Express + stereo is the only way I know.

If you only want iTunes content played externally, then just the AirPort Express + stereo will suffice (streamed from your Mac).

The Sonos system is something different altogether. AFAIK, it has its own interface, and is not reliant on (in fact, is completely separate from) iTunes.

As an aside, the AirPort-related acronyms are confusing. Evolution-wise, they are as follows:

AP = AirPort (802.11b)
APE or AE = AirPort Extreme (802.11b/g and newer)
APX or AX = AirPort Express
AEBS = AirPort Extreme Base Station

The main confusion is with APE and APX.

Please feel free to correct me if I got them mixed up!

Airfoil would definitely do the trick. Added benefit of the APX (thanks Aladdin) is that I could hook my printer up to it too (even though I don't really print too often).

Will Windows XP / Vista recognize the printer shared via the APX? I remember sharing a printer wirelessly through a desktop Mac a while back - Other mac laptops worked beautifully, but I never did get a PC working with it.

Now, the final question is: Do I really NEED the Airport Express ? Only I can answer that one...

Airfoil + AirPort Express is only suitable if you wanna stream your music and system sounds etc across.

However if you're gonna be watching video's and wanting to stream audio over. It will be laggy as hell. Unless the lag is constant and you use something like VLC to change the timing of video/audio. Otherwise it simply wont work.

Believe me, at one stage i was anal about having everything wire free too. At the end of the day its more practical to physically connect things with each other

p.s. the lag issue is prob due to running on a slow wifi network, maybe a robust 802.11/n connection would perform much better

This is a real helpful topic...

Lucky i searched because i was about to start a new thread!

thanks again guys

My brother bought a set of some Creative SL3100 Bluetooth headphones, which are pretty good. I know they're not speakers, but the headphones are pretty good for $180.00

Creative Wireless Headphones (C4361) - Dick Smith Electronics - Australia.

Another vote for wireless headphones here.