Q: I have an Airplay enabled AV Receiver - how do i set up Airplay

Any receiver which is Airplay compatible means no other device such as Apple TV is required to stream music from Mac (Mountain Lion Mac OS 10.8.x required, older versions of Mac OS X are not supported) and iOS devices (agsin make sure iOS version is up to date ,ie 6.0.1 or 6.0.2 if you have iPhone 5 or iPad mini).

Make sure no password protection has been set for Airplay feature on your receiver, fire up Apple Music Player on your iPhone, locate white Airplay icon (solid triangle in hollow rectangle) next to volume slider at the bottom of display. Click on the Airplay icon and a list should popup to show all avilable Airplay devices, if your receiver is not in the list, then there is no way to stream music to the receiver. No specific setup procedure required on iOS device (works out-of-box by default), refer to receiver's manual for proper setup.

You are making some progress with setup of wireless network. Apparently there is reliability problem with the wireless connection. Perhaps you want to refer to following Apple support documents and start tweaking parameters in the router to improve the reliability. I used to have third-party routers such as Belkin and Netgear but switched to Apple Airport routers (Time Capsule then Airport Extreme for now) because of incompatibility issues whenever Apple upgrade Mac OS X. But since Apple develops Airplay protocol as alternative to Bluetooth for wireless audio/video streaming (with much better bandwidth) and must be deployed in any wireless network, there is no reason third-party routers not working for Airplay protocol.

About AirPlay Mirroring in OS X Mountain Lion:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5404

iOS: Recommended settings for Wi-Fi routers and access points:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4199

Troubleshooting AirPlay and AirPlay Mirroring:

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS4215

Good luck in setting up 802.11 wirelesss network.

Forgotten to mention following critical setup to ensure reliable connection for Airplay streaming:

If your router is close to the Yamaha receiver, then use Ethernet cable to connect between the equipments instead of relying on wireless connection. This way, you have one hop of wireless connection (iPhone/Mac > Router) and one hop of wired connection (Router > Yamaha) instead of two hops of wirless connection.

I have Apple Airport Extreme as main router with all networked devices connected to this router through CAT6 Ethernet cables. These devices include Synology Diskstation DS212 for wireless Time Machine backup, Apple TV 3 for video/audio streamings and Sonos Zone Players for audio streaming. Main audio system make up of Zodiag DAC, Bel Canto power amplifier driving Bowers & Wilkins 683 tower speakers. Audio quality and connection reliability through Airplay/WiFi should be better than Bluetooth when set up properly. I can stream music from iMac/iPad/iPhone through Airplay/WiFi from any corner of my house to the high-end audio system without loss in audio fidelity and connection reliability (unlike Bluetooth there is no connection dropout at all).

I found that manually setting up the network connection in the receiver menu is the best way to ensure that all functionality (including AirPlay) is most reliable. In automatic network mode (DHCP On) I noticed that my receiver would disappear from the network. The manual method ensures that the system has a permanent network address.

Jason,

How do you do the manual set-up?  My connection to the router is via Ethernet.  If I unplug the router and plug it in again I see the airplay icon but if I then turn off the receiver it loses the connection.  Very annoying!!! would appreciate any advice.

Thanks

Is it possible to change the name of the receiver as it appears in airplay?  I am not seeing this in the manual...

Yes, you can type the receiver's ip address into your web browser and access settings to change the name.

I had much better connectivity with my airplay when I disabled DHCP and entered the ip address manually in the receiver settings.

Hi all,

Thanks for the information. I have managed to fix this problem. I have switched off DHCP on my receiver and on my Airport Time Capsule and my receiver is being recognized for airplay again by my iOS devices. 

Bjorn