I've been told by a couple of AirPlay speaker owners (self-proclaimed audiophiles

) that AirPlay has a technical advantage over Bluetooth.... something to do with Bluetooth being "lossy" (loses original data when packaged for transmission) while AirPlay is not. This reminds of the ancient format debates between JPEG (lossy image compression) versus something like PICT or PNG.
Anyone with more technical knowledge care to elaborate?
Bluetooth A2DP uses lossy codecs (MPEG, AAC) so yes there will always be some degradation over the original source. But unless you have a high bitrate recording,
there should be no additional
loss because of the bluetooth transmission the loss comes when you encode into MP3.
It's possible to achieve bitrates of about 320kbps for MP3.
With myself being quite satisfied with the sound quality of 256kb AAC, I'm no audiophile. So in listening to the same track, will I be able to tell the difference if I listen to an AirPlay output versus a Bluetooth one? (assuming that everything else is equal like the quality and build of the speakers)
Probably not at that bitrate and with typical quality Airplay/bluetooth speakers.
I have a set of Philips bluetooth headphones and they're pretty good on the
headphone (not headset) bluetooth profile. Occasionally, they do drop audio
(probably interference) and the pairing process is a pain if you change the source.
They have a range of about 30'.
The main advantages of Airplay over bluetooth are that it will let you use higher bitrates
(including lossless ALAC) and longer distances, and that it's not prone to interference
from cordless phones etc. I think it's likely that the speaker quality will generally be better for
Airplay, though - bluetooth speakers are generally selling into the cheap convenience market.
I play my audio from an ATV1 through optical cable to a 120W per channel amp.
Most of my recordings are still MP3 VBR, but I'm using ALAC for any new ones.
Airplay wouldn't help me much for my main setup since I'd still need to power and amplify my speakers (150W).