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I have no great experience with Bluetooth Speakers, but the magic of the HomePod is that they use Airplay 2 which piggybacks on WiFi and has some advantages: -
by ralfd 6y ago
I have no great experience with Bluetooth Speakers, but the magic of the HomePod is that they use Airplay 2 which piggybacks on WiFi and has some advantages:
- AirPlay uses lossless compression to stream audio from source to speaker. All Bluetooth audio streaming uses lossy compression.
- AirPlay has the capability of playing across a much larger distance and with a solid connection between devices than Bluetooth.
- When using AirPlay you’re actually capable of controlling the volume of the Airplay speaker (not just the volume of the device which transfers to the Bluetooth device).
- Airplay can stream to multiple output devices. Bluetooth is one-to-one streaming.
- AirPlay caches multiple minutes of Audio (or Video). AFAIK Bluetooth does not cache.
A sibling comment talked about using a Sonos with Bluetooth, but having delay issues. There is no lag on AirPlay:
https://www.reddit.com/r/HomePod/comments/gt4g40/lag/ https://www.reddit.com/r/HomePod/comments/gt4g40/lag/
- thebean11 6y agoI might be misunderstanding, so if all I have are iPhones and MacBooks, this actually would allow me to play arbitrary audio from my devices?
- jb0x168 6y agoYes. If you use an app like AirParrot, you can do it from windows as well. Can't speak to android specifically but I believe there's an App For That as well.
- thebean11 6y agoAlright, being limited to certain devices seems less bad than being limited to specific apps like Sonos
- jscholes 6y ago> Alright, being limited to certain devices seems less bad than being limited to specific apps like Sonos Sonos also supports AirPlay, as well as DLNA/UPnP rendering. So for example you can set a Sonos speaker as the output device, wirelessly, in the latest nightly builds of VLC[1]. [1] https://shaleenjain.com/blog/vlc-dlna-support-2/ https://shaleenjain.com/blog/vlc-dlna-support-2/