Audio AirPlay Sucks

[houssein31]

I bought a Airplay speaker this week and Im noticing that it really sucks compared to bluetooth. I thought Airplay was suppose to be better but it is so laggy. For example when I press play on my phone, it takes about 2-3 secondes before music actually plays, while on my small bluetooth speaker, its instant.

Could this be a iOS8 bug? Is AirPlay usually laggy fro you guys too? Because i read on multiple sites that Airplay was better...?

 

[afsnyder]

It depends on your network. iOS 8 introduced Peer to Peer AirPlay but I'm not sure if that was Apple TV exclusive. They did change something though.

EDIT: Check online to see if there were AirPlay issues with the speaker you bought.

 

[Cojm]

I bought a Airplay speaker this week and Im noticing that it really sucks compared to bluetooth. I thought Airplay was suppose to be better but it is so laggy. For example when I press play on my phone, it takes about 2-3 secondes before music actually plays, while on my small bluetooth speaker, its instant.

Could this be a iOS8 bug? Is AirPlay usually laggy fro you guys too? Because i read on multiple sites that Airplay was better...?

airplay has always been laggy for me, but the quality over BT is astounding.

 

[Sirious]

Audio through AirPlay depends on your network, whereas Bluetooth relies on the proximity of your devices.

I personally find AirPlay pretty reliable.

 

[nilk]

I rarely have a flawless experience when using Airplay over Wifi. But what I do most of the time is Airplay from iTunes to my Airport Expresses and Apple TV over a wired network, and this works quite well. There is some lag before it starts, but it's not long enough to be annoying.

 

[ZEEN0j]

I believe AirPlay has a built in delay of 3 seconds to let media buffer. The quality is great though, all depends on the network. I'm fine with the delay for music. Not so much for video.

 

[darkfiber]

I bought a Airplay speaker this week and Im noticing that it really sucks compared to bluetooth. I thought Airplay was suppose to be better but it is so laggy. For example when I press play on my phone, it takes about 2-3 secondes before music actually plays, while on my small bluetooth speaker, its instant.

Could this be a iOS8 bug? Is AirPlay usually laggy fro you guys too? Because i read on multiple sites that Airplay was better...?

The delay from when I select the Airplay speaker to when it actually plays on my "Audyssey Audio Dock Air" Airplay speaker always has been about 8 seconds.

I had had another issue under iOS 8.x with Airplay however...

Airplay worked pretty well for me under 7.1.2 with my "Audyssey Audio Dock Air" Airplay speaker, except for the occasional times the audio would drop out. However, under iOS 8.x it is definitely buggy. When I am playing a song on my iPhone 5s running 8.0, 8.0.2 or even now with 8.1 beta 2, and then select Airplay from the control panel and select the speaker after a few seconds something in the background seems to crash and my iPhone speaker is selected again. It also unselects whatever song I am playing. If I then try to reselect Airplay and the speaker I want to music sent to and then select the song again sometimes it works. I reported it to Apple via the bug reporter and they came back and asked me for crash logs. It appears that "stacksmediaserverd" is what crashes and I sent them that log. They came back and told me that my issue was a duplicate of another issue that had already been reported. So hopefully they will fix it soon in an upcoming release. Unfortunately it doesn't appear to be fixed as of 8.1b2.

 

[macduke]

AirPlay in general has been buggy for me. Sometimes it takes multiple attempts to get the video to show up on the screen. The actual streaming has gotten much better, however, since I bought the 802.11AC AirPort Extreme. The video loads faster now, but still fails sometimes. Once I get a solid stream going, it's usually good for hours, such as streaming the MLB ALCS using the TBS app (GO ROYALS!). Sometimes when my phone falls to sleep the stream stops, which is ridiculous because then I have to keep tapping on the screen just to show my wife a 4 minute YouTube video. Other times it plays fine with the screen off. My wife used to try to stream kids music to the TV for daycare, but now she just uses the BT in our soundbar.

 

[takeshi74]

I thought Airplay was suppose to be better but it is so laggy.

2 seconds of delay is normal for buffering. Excessive lag is indicative of issues with your WiFi network.

AirPlay is better in terms of audio quality. If lag trumps all else for you then AirPlay might not be for you. Make sure you do your research versus just relying on the word "better". Make sure you understand how something is better and what compromises you might have to accept when making such comparisons.