In a nutshell, AirPlay 2 decouples the media and the control streams. This makes play/pause etc instant (rather than waiting for the 3 second buffer to run out

In a nutshell, AirPlay 2 decouples the media and the control streams. This makes play/pause etc instant (rather than waiting for the 3 second buffer to run out) and makes it much easier to do multi-speaker audio as they're all listening to the same media stream.