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Does airplay 2 support high resolution audio?

helloworld

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Jul 10, 2018
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It’s well known that airplay 1 only supports 16bit/44khz, but I could not find any information about the airplay 2. Does it support 24bit/192khz? Does it support flac? Thanks
 

dts350z

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Sep 10, 2018
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There is (or was) a way to sneak dts encoded autio (so more channels, not higher resolution) because it is/was bit perfect at 44.1Khz 16bits. Newer apple TVs insisted on trans-coding everything to 48Khz, so broke dts encoded 44.1 content. I haven't kept track of recent hardware, still having some working airport stations with optical outs, to deliver dts 5.1 streams, from itunes, to dts decoders.

http://www.surroundbyus.com/sbu/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=154
 

leonroy

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Feb 15, 2018
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Would love it if someone could shed light on Airplay 2 support for high res.

Best I could find is the slide below which explicitly describes support for up to 16 bit audio at 48kHz and various bit depths. Source: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2017/509/

1570660367232.png
 

NickDun

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Jun 19, 2021
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According to this, all audio is transcoded to Apple Lossless at 16/44 for transmission proposes - 16/44 exceeds human earing anyway. In other words, it'll take whatever you throw at it just fine, regardless of your source, as long as it's compatible with Apple's software & hardware.


https://www.kirkville.com/how-apples-airplay-streams-audio/
Today I was streaming apple lossless from an iPhone into a Linn Majik DSM via airplay 2. I could hear it was not as good as the hires file being played off the Kazoo server on a Mac mini … I could hear the difference which is why I went searching to understand what the bandwidth of airplay is. Yes I can’t hear 48khz or 96 khz (or even 22khz, but I can tell the difference berween 16 and 24 bit … so this stuff does matter
 

eas

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Jun 12, 2021
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When playing a lossless track from the Apple Music library Apple Music transcodes it to 256kbps AAC before sending it to AirPlay 2 receivers.

It will maintain the lossless signal chain when you are playing an ALAC you ripped yourself.

Most people (including me before about a week ago) don't know that Apple added support for more codecs in AirPlay 2. That they deploy ALAC in conjunction with Apple Music Lossless streams is perverse. We can hope that it is a bug, but I'm not so sure.
 
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