With AirPlay 2, all the music should play in sync, letting you move from room to room and enjoy a seamless audio experience. Also, previously there was a delay between the rooms-an effect that could be annoying if you walked from room to room or if you stood in a place where you could hear more than one speaker at a time. Previously you could send music to more than one device at a time only if you used iTunes on a computer, but even from the desktop it still allowed you to send just one audio stream to all your speakers. For instance, if you have an AirPlay 2 speaker in your bedroom and a compatible AV receiver and speakers in your living room, you can send music from your iPhone to both systems. So how important is AirPlay 2’s headline feature? Now you can play music from your iPhone or iPad in multiple places at the same time. If you don’t have a wireless home network in place, AirPlay can still work by creating its own wireless network between AirPlay-compatible devices. A more obvious benefit to using Wi-Fi is that AirPlay can stream the signal over longer distances than Bluetooth, which works best within one room. In reality, though, most people wouldn’t hear any difference. Similar to other wireless streaming systems, AirPlay works over Wi-Fi, so in theory it should sound better than Bluetooth, which uses a more compressed audio format.

This potentially changes the whole wireless-audio landscape, making AirPlay a real competitor to true multiroom audio systems like Sonos. Apple’s proprietary streaming protocol lets you wirelessly send music and video from an iPhone or iPad to a compatible speaker, receiver, or Apple TV (it works much like Bluetooth, except you can send video too).Īs part of the iOS 11.4 update, Apple has launched a new version, called AirPlay 2, which lets you stream music to multiple devices-including Apple’s HomePod speaker-at the same time.

If you own an Apple device or three, it’s a safe bet that you’ve used AirPlay.

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