Q: Airplay sound quality with Airplay iTunes and Airplay System Audio
So there are different kinds of Airplay.
1. There is Airplay in iTunes (the Airplay button left from the volume slider). If I turn that on, I can play my music on my hifi-system, via my AppleTV.
2. And there is Airplay in system setting. You can find that one
a. in the Audio/MIDI configuration app and
b. in the sound-icon in the menubar (with ALT-click).
These two are coupled. If I select my AppleTV with ALT-click on the speaker icon in the menu bar; I can also play music on my hifi system, via my AppleTV.
But why is the sound quality so much better via the system setting??? What happens? It REALLY is different. With option1 it is just music. With option 2 it is wonderful hifi; better than anything I've ever heard on my system.
Is it because option 2 does just feed a bitperfect signal through the AppleTV to my DAC? And option 1 does some nasty upsampling, presumably the 48kHz of the AppleTV?
Apple TV, OS X Mavericks (10.9.1), MacBook
Posted on Jan 22, 2014 2:14 AM