Hi
For a while, Airplay was an afterthought for me. I only used it, from my iPhone to the TVs or to the bedroom SONOS Soundbar. Not for critical listening. For some odd reasons, the algorithm in SPOTIFY which has been serving me very good music for the past several 7 + years, has become ..lazy, serving me with the same cuts weeks after weeks: Suggested playlists have been basically the same, stale ... Not pleased..
Anyway, I have been using Apple Music more ... My takes:
Not pleased.
Apple Music doesn't have the equivalent of the simple and elegant Spotify connect.. Only that Airplay2 thing.. which is not too evident if you ask me.. You don't always find it on the screen and have to resort to a specific screen for the ApplePlay icon, to appear... And yes it crackles... on music whether I use iPad (latest "Air") or my iPhone 13 Pro. Wi-Fi is as good as it can be, with a dedicated AP in the listening room. No bandwidth issue, the speed from my 2 local providers has increased to 30 Mbps and the other to 105 Mbps, while jitter is small according to Speedtest... UNder the same condition, no problems with Spotify Connect.. On Apple Music, crackling problems are clearly audible whether I send the stream to an Apple TV 4K, 2 Gen connected to the media player input of the Denon, or directly to the Airplay-compliant Denon AVR. Same. Another weird issue with ApplePlay is that it becomes unreliable if you use Ethernet.. It works or ..not. I would have considered Tidal or Qobuz , if it weren't for the ever increasing streaming bills... Hovering now around $100 for Netflix, Apple, Disney, Amazon Music
FWIW, Apple has not been good on its software rollout the past few months.. There is an ongoing debacle, that started when they adopted a "new" HomeKit architecture with the 16.2 IOS release: Items that were functioning well before, are no longer discovered or become unresponsive.. Automations, that were rock-solid, henceforth, fail. A mess that is not yet fixed after many weeks, and I still do not comprehend Appel Music interface. Not to the usual good standard of Apple UI, definitely inferior to Spotify's ... And to make things more annoying, Apple has not yet integrated Primephonic Classical music Interface. They had acquired Primphonic, since August 2021 ...
Annoyed.
Peace.