Poor sound quality, Airport Express

Hi,
I have this 2 yrs old airport express but it has all of the sudden a really poor sound quality.
When I connect it to my home stereo and play through airplay and if I connect headphones the sound is very poor and scratchy
I've used 3 diffferent cables to connect it to my home stereo and i've tried 2 different set of headphnoes.
When i connect directly to my home stereo with RCA cable the sound is fine.
Is the only solution to buy a new airport?
Thank you.

Based on your description, it appears that the base station's internal DAC is the issue and may be failing. Unfortunately these are not user replaceable parts and a complete base station replacement may be the only option at this point in time.
One other option to try, if your stereo supports digital optical input, is to use a mini-jack Toslink cable connected between the base station's audio port and the stereo to see if you can get "clean" sound this way.

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