Airplay vs chromcast

Chromecasting should work if you have Google Home installed but it will be limited to apps that allow it on Ipad/iPhone. ChromeCast can handle higher bit rate audio than airplay. If its worth it for you depends on what you want to do with it.  Airplay wont work on Android at all without rooting the device and invalidating its warranty. So big G is not as closed shop as Apple.

Personally all this casting/Airplay stuff is a right mess.

Airplay with newer Naim streamers at least allows gapless playback BUT is limited to CD quality.

While Chromecast allows hi-res I cannot play gapless on a Nova despite trying various tweaks and 3rd party tools.

Competing standards which just don't behave as they should in this day and age - the customer's expectations of what should be achievable are far ahead of decent implementation by manufacturers trying to push proprietary streaming standards.

I used airplay to listen to a few streams uncompressed from primephonic, the quality wasn’t a match for CD rips.

Looks like I’ll have to look into getting google home setup, I have the app but there must be something that needs setting to get noise from chromecast to come through the 555.

Alley Cat posted:

Competing standards which just don't behave as they should in this day and age - the customer's expectations of what should be achievable are far ahead of decent implementation by manufacturers trying to push proprietary streaming standards.

The trouble is they are not open standards at all, they are simply proprietary specifications.. and as such don’t have the focus and scrutiny of proper standards... I certainly wouldn’t rely on them for serious music enjoyment, I would treat them more as a toy or a convenience compromise.

Airplay cant even do CD resolution in the vast majority of cases, as it often resamples 44.1 to 48 kHz which is not a good idea at all if SQ is important to you (as relatively large amounts of digital arithmetic noise will be added)... but sure it’s great for playing your holiday videos through your TV with, or beaming to a lofi portable speaker for a bit of fun.

Alley Cat posted:

Personally all this casting/Airplay stuff is a right mess.

Airplay with newer Naim streamers at least allows gapless playback BUT is limited to CD quality.

While Chromecast allows hi-res I cannot play gapless on a Nova despite trying various tweaks and 3rd party tools.

Competing standards which just don't behave as they should in this day and age - the customer's expectations of what should be achievable are far ahead of decent implementation by manufacturers trying to push proprietary streaming standards.

You can get Chromecast to do gapless, you just need to use an Android device and cast the screen (instead of the app), or use an app written to cast gapless.

This shows how it's done from a technical perspective...
https://forums.naimaudio.com/t...19#77033103064740519

Simon-in-Suffolk posted:

Alley Cat posted:

Competing standards which just don't behave as they should in this day and age - the customer's expectations of what should be achievable are far ahead of decent implementation by manufacturers trying to push proprietary streaming standards.

The trouble is they are not open standards at all, they are simply proprietary specifications.. and as such don’t have the focus and scrutiny of proper standards... I certainly wouldn’t rely on them for serious music enjoyment, I would treat them more as a toy or a convenience compromise.

Airplay cant even do CD resolution in the vast majority of cases, as it often resamples 44.1 to 48 kHz which is not a good idea at all if SQ is important to you (as relatively large amounts of digital arithmetic noise will be added)... but sure it’s great for playing your holiday videos through your TV with, or beaming to a lofi portable speaker for a bit of fun.

Good point about these things not being proper open standards.

Yes, was going to mention the 48kHz resampling which started with AppleTV 2 from memory.  Can’t remember if the last Express did this too for optical out.  I’m not sure how iTunes or iOS handle things these days but they may well convert source files to 16/44.1 streams for licensed Airplay devices not upsampling to 48kHZ.  I wonder if the Naim app might give an indication, must check.

Alley Cat posted:

Simon-in-Suffolk posted:

Alley Cat posted:

Competing standards which just don't behave as they should in this day and age - the customer's expectations of what should be achievable are far ahead of decent implementation by manufacturers trying to push proprietary streaming standards.

The trouble is they are not open standards at all, they are simply proprietary specifications.. and as such don’t have the focus and scrutiny of proper standards... I certainly wouldn’t rely on them for serious music enjoyment, I would treat them more as a toy or a convenience compromise.

Airplay cant even do CD resolution in the vast majority of cases, as it often resamples 44.1 to 48 kHz which is not a good idea at all if SQ is important to you (as relatively large amounts of digital arithmetic noise will be added)... but sure it’s great for playing your holiday videos through your TV with, or beaming to a lofi portable speaker for a bit of fun.

Good point about these things not being proper open standards.

Yes, was going to mention the 48kHz resampling which started with AppleTV 2 from memory.  Can’t remember if the last Express did this too for optical out.  I’m not sure how iTunes or iOS handle things these days but they may well convert source files to 16/44.1 streams for licensed Airplay devices not upsampling to 48kHZ.  I wonder if the Naim app might give an indication, must check. 

It’s a little unfortunate if this argument also applies to Chromecast, given that Naim have chosen to implement it as an alternative to native support for Qobuz and other web based services. Not so much a problem for those of us with our own music collection, but incresingly, for many people, streaming IS web streaming, and they will judge sound quality using those web sources that they use. 

Chromecast transmits audio streams at native resolution, it doesn't truncate or re-sample.

With a stable network it can successfully transmit 24/192 FLAC.

Huge posted:

Chromecast transmits audio streams at native resolution, it doesn't truncate or re-sample.

With a stable network it can successfully transmit 24/192 FLAC.

....and that of course is an attraction of Chromecast over Airplay.

I appreciate I've been round the mulberry bush where the new Uniti series is concerned with Qobuz app and gapless playback (Audirvana too).

I assume Qobuz just don't want to invest the time in making it work gapless, or that there's a software reason on the new streamers which won't easily allow it.

While I could buy an Android device, or try various software utilities to try to get gapless to work, I think most users would prefer not to have to.

Thanks for the link above, missed that thread.

Alley Cat posted:

Yes, was going to mention the 48kHz resampling which started with AppleTV 2 from memory.  Can’t remember if the last Express did this too for optical out.  I’m not sure how iTunes or iOS handle things these days but they may well convert source files to 16/44.1 streams for licensed Airplay devices not upsampling to 48kHZ.  I wonder if the Naim app might give an indication, must check.

I checked from my iPhone (iOS 12) and Mac/iTunes (12.8.0) and using AirPlay to my Atom.
The Atom showed on both the display as well as the app only that the source was "Airplay" - no information on encoding.

To all quick research I did, AirPlay always uses stereo 16 bit 44100 Hz. (It could use either PCM, ALAC, or AAC; according to one source.)
(Which means, any streaming source will have to convert whatever input it has to this. Since Apple never sold "CD-quality" music themselves (only AAC) and the original AirPlay is from times, when even LAN and especially WLAN were limited in bandwidth, they likely never considered other use cases beyond this quality level.)

I did not look into what AppleTVs do or did in the various generations, when receiving an AirPlay (audio) stream and sending the output to a Toslink or HDMI digital output. However, unless you connect your AppleTV to your box and stream audio through that (instead of directly to the box), this should not matter here. (Watching movies is another story...)

(I did not start a capture on my network traffic; just did a quick search/browse on the topic.)

PS: I might need to research AirPlay 2... - let's see, when naim is ready with that one. 

Alley Cat posted:

Personally all this casting/Airplay stuff is a right mess.

Airplay with newer Naim streamers at least allows gapless playback BUT is limited to CD quality.

While Chromecast allows hi-res I cannot play gapless on a Nova despite trying various tweaks and 3rd party tools.

Competing standards which just don't behave as they should in this day and age - the customer's expectations of what should be achievable are far ahead of decent implementation by manufacturers trying to push proprietary streaming standards.

I agree but is upnp is any better? No, you come across the same limitations in certain kit. I still have 2 upnp wireless speakers that nothing can play gapless to and I have tried everything. The new Unitis can only play gapless using Naims own app and upnp implementation os other controllers are useless and don't forget OpenHome to add to the list.

Philipp vH posted:

PS: I might need to research AirPlay 2... - let's see, when naim is ready with that one. 

BasicALLY MULTI-ROOM/MULTI-SPEAKER AIRPLAy.

No quality upgrade where bit depth/sample rate are concerned.

A couple of weeks ago Sound & Vision suggested Qobuz will offer Roon integration. That's one less service needing the use of Airplay/Chromecast.

According to Dan Mackta, managing director Qobuz USA, the service will offer Roon integration by the end of the year.

_{Source: https://www.soundandvision.com...gets-ready-its-close}

I picked up a Chromecast yesterday to use with Roon's new 'Displays' feature. That's one up on AirPlay. The Chromecast was easy to setup and appears to work well with Roon.

Displays sends a basic now playing screen to any display/TV connected to a Chromecast or web browser, which is fun for parties etc.

Note that Real-time Lyrics can be turned off from the Displays tab of Settings.

_{Source: https://kb.roonlabs.com/Displays}

Chromecast is actually pretty good for integration using a service aggregator that connects to the remote service then transmits to the player using Chromecast.

It supports 5GHz WiFi, it supports HD up to 24/192 and it does support gapless transmission.

The reason gapless so often fails with Chromecast is not due to Chromecast or it's API, but due to the design of the software being used to transmit the stream to the Chromecast receiver.