AirPlay vs. P2P AirPlay - which is more stable?

Discussion in 'Audio Hardware' started by Atmospheric, Jan 7, 2015.

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  1. Atmospheric

    Atmospheric Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    Eugene
    I've really been having some issues with AirPlay. I just want to stream off my iPad to my Sony ES receiver. It's super buggy. Sometimes it works for hours, other times it drops and hangs after a few minutes. I've troubleshot it from the Wi-Fi standpoint. My network is pretty fast 802.1ac.

    I dunno, I'm think of buying an ATV just for the peer-to-peer AirPlay feature.

    Does anyone have any direct experience comparing these two flavors of AirPlay? Is P2P AirPlay any more stable?
     
  2. SamS

    SamS Forum Legend

    Location:
    Texas
    Peer-to-peer AirPlay is no panacea. I have tried both ways. P2P more in a "can it work" situation. I found the connection rather flaky. This is with an iPhone 6 Plus and the newest ATV, A1469. The range is decent, but I had drop outs.

    Assuming your Wifi is decent, I'd just use standard Airplay over Wifi.

    There is no telling what is wrong with your Sony ES, probably something about its Airplay implementation is buggy. Using a real AppleTV on a decent Wifi network, you should be good.
     
    Atmospheric likes this.
  3. Rolltide

    Rolltide Forum Resident

    Location:
    Vallejo, CA
    P2p Airplay works even worse then normal Airplay does in my experience.

    I really loved Airplay a few years and a few iterations of iTunes/OSX/etc ago when it worked perfectly every time. I've since given up and gone Sonos, which has been rock solid.
     
  4. Atmospheric

    Atmospheric Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    Eugene
    It looks like I have to use Sonos speakers. Deal killer. I want to stream through my existing home theatre system.
     
  5. SamS

    SamS Forum Legend

    Location:
    Texas
    Say what? You can use any speakers/receiver you want to, with AppleTV. It has an optical jack that you connect to your Sony AVR, and it outputs 16/48 for all sources.
     
  6. Atmospheric

    Atmospheric Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    Eugene
    You're mixing up responses. I was responding to Rolltide who suggested Sonos.
     
  7. SamS

    SamS Forum Legend

    Location:
    Texas
  8. Atmospheric

    Atmospheric Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    Eugene
  9. Brother_Rael

    Brother_Rael Senior Member

    Yup. Works a charm for me.
     
  10. Rolltide

    Rolltide Forum Resident

    Location:
    Vallejo, CA
    The Sonos in question is the Sonos Connect, which is outputs optical or coaxial digital as well as analog audio.
     
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  11. gloomrider

    gloomrider Well-Known Member

    Location:
    Hollywood, CA, USA
    As @SamS points out, the ATV will output only 48kHz audio when being fed 44.1kHz material. Where does the upsample happen? Does the sending device do the upsampling or the ATV itself?

    I'm thinking if an iPhone has to do the upsampling before sending over WiFi, that may create a situation where the iPhone can barely perform those concurrent tasks, causing the symptoms that many describe here and elsewhere.

    As I've pointed out before, my experience with Airplay audio 44.1kHz to an ATV (and the mediocre upsampling in that chain) was disappointing. The bit-perfect output of an Airport Express is far, far superior IMHO.
     
  12. everton

    everton Forum Resident

    Location:
    Canada
    I have a current-model Sony receiver (non-ES). I have the same problem. The Airplay through the receiver is very spotty. I have an Apple TV in the bed room connected to another system. The connection through Apple TV seems more stable to me.
     
    Atmospheric likes this.
  13. Atmospheric

    Atmospheric Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    Eugene
    Well, I decided to give the latest ten Apple TV a try, mostly because if it worked, it would be the most cost effective solution.

    I didn't mention it on this thread, but I previously owned one of the 2nd gen ATVs with the internal HD. It was buggy as hell from the day I first got it. So I wasn't particularly optimistic about the latest gen ATV.

    I'm pleasantly surprised. Streaming, both with AirPlay and Home Sharing, seems pretty darned stable. There's a bit of latency with Home Sharing in that the cover art takes a second or so to display when a song starts playing. With Home Sharing, I can stream my lossless files off of my iMac, which sounds pretty darned impressive. I bet there's some downsampling going on (I should Google that), but it sounds noticeably better than AirPlay which is 256 AAC on my portable devices.

    The video is so good of the ATV that it actually shows all the blems in my album art. Oh well.

    Knock on wood. Maybe this will work for me.

    Thanks again to those who encouraged me to give ATV another try.
     
    Brother_Rael likes this.
  14. Veni Vidi Vici

    Veni Vidi Vici Forum Resident

    Location:
    Chicago, IL
    There's a long standing bug involving production of artwork renderings for the ATV Now Playing screen that I wish Apple would fix. In the mode where the ATV is primary and accessing your library, certain images, especially large ones, or tracks with many embedded artworks, will cause ATV to hang often indefinitely, at 2 seconds into a track. Switch to the mode where your iTunes is primary and using ATV as speakers, ie. AirPlay, the playback is fine. It seems as if the image is being scaled or whatever for the Now Playing display either by the ATV or by your computer, and the former can't handle it sometimes - but knowing nothing really about the protocol, it's probably something else entirely.
     
  15. Atmospheric

    Atmospheric Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    Eugene
    Nice! Apple certainly knows how to include at least one nasty bug with each equipment purchase. I look forward to experiencing that bug first hand.

    Apple so reminds me of Microsoft 15 years ago. Everything is a hassle. Apple stuff used to just work right out of the box, in contrast to Microsoft products. I wish some young turk company would come along and take Apple to the woodshed. I think they are ripe for such a move. Proud, complacent, and a bit incompetent around the edges.
     
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  16. tvstrategies

    tvstrategies Turtles, all the way down.

    This post strays off topic but my immediate reaction was 'yeah, Apple is lazy because my phone doesn't sync sometimes,' but you haven't had to set up a multipoint wifi home network using 'generic' routers, which I thought I was man enough to do (my wife has Windows PC, a mixed marriage) and I had it in my head that i needed to update my routers.

    Sorry but http://192.168.1.1 and manual configuration using the router's menus was so impenetrable (I'll spare you the details - settings didn't take, etc etc) that I just took the whole thing back to Fry's and got my money back. I do get annoyed by Apple's insistance to call an access point a 'base station,' but their network utility is great and stuff all works fine in my house. As do the Windows machines, the Roku, the Apple TV, etc

    I guess YMMV, but I often forget that the music gets around the house over wifi because it just works and the sound is fine. The main router is a 2011 Airport Extreme 802.11N/AC) and the clients (Express) are all older (2002? 802.11 pre-N). Versus Google Nexus and Microsoft hardware, where updates are an afterthought or a non-consideration. I had an original Logitech Revue with Google TV, and Google's change from Android Market to Google Play bricked it. Six months old. Designed for early adopters, not people with any expectations.
     
    Last edited: Jan 27, 2015
  17. Atmospheric

    Atmospheric Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    Eugene
    You have no idea of the various travails I've had with Apple in the past 6 months, since IOS 8 and Yosemite. I still stand by my observation: stuff is routinely broken these days. Apple used to be able to just get it right. I think a lot of that had to do with a CEO who would say, "no, it's not good enough, go back and work on it some more."

    I work in software development. If I had to grade Apple QA, I would give them a C- (at best). Their software development culture is out of control. Sadly, I see it only getting worse. It gives me no pleasure to say that. I'm not an Apple hater. Far from it. I still marvel that Apple managed to get Unix on the desktop in a form that my wife can use. They don't get enough credit for that IMO. Does anyone fully appreciate that you can use an OS X computer and never have to any reason to enter root credentials? That's a huge accomplishment.

    I wish their shizzle just worked, like it used to. Eventually, a business that complacent will get taken down a notch by the next business with a passion to get it right. Right now, I don't see that next business on the horizon, but it's always there... eventually.
     
    tvstrategies and Veni Vidi Vici like this.
  18. tvstrategies

    tvstrategies Turtles, all the way down.

    {This is pretty off-topic for this thread, but the above post set me off...}

    Hi Atmospheric - Although my experiences with Apple wireless networking have been very positive, I fully agree with your premise. So does this article, which came on the heels of Apple's record quarter yesterday: http://www.telecomtv.com/articles/smartphones/apple-continues-its-march-to-global-domination-12139 Like you, I do hope that Apple is held accountable.

    Other than for networking, I've had some frustrating experiences with Apple software quality assurance. With Mavericks, my 2010 Macbook Pro suddenly got terrible screen artifacts (which I assume was) as the result of their allowing the software out the door without regression-testing for with that model. Finder windows would be obliterated by random visual noise patterns. The Applecare support people had me do all kinds of re-sets and diagnostics and they couldn't figure it out. They sent me to the local store to replace the motherboard twice at their expense, and that didn't solve the problem. It was how Mavericks made use of the nVidia graphics processor (probably the memory management relating to it), and the problem went away if you went to Energy Saver and turned the nVidia processor off (the setting for "better performance vs better battery life"). So in other words, you had to disable some basic functionality in your Mac as a workaround. Apple got a class action suit for something similar, so you woulda thought that they would be sensitive to it. Yosemite did finally solve the issue. There was a ton of angry chatter about this on Apple's discussion boards, but Apple does not monitor them (!)

    PS - My career is also in software, and I have a lot of personal history with Apple. I can testify that Apple once did a much, much better job. I managed Northern Telecom's product development relationship with Apple in late 80s/early 90s, where we built the first personal videoconferencing product (1991) that used off the shelf Mac IIs and Mac SEs paired with office phones and switched-56 data (H.261, QCIF "squint-o-vision," ~15 frames per second, black and white, as a window on the Mac screen, along with phone directory and phone dialer windows. In other words, we basically built Skype in 1991 without Internet Protocol). Also I was a product manager for a Mac product at Aldus/Adobe in the '90s. We had direct access to Apple engineers whenever we wanted it, pick up the phone and call them. We also got personal AppleLink (their internal email at the time) accounts. John Sculley was accessible for pete's sake.

    Now I have some distance from Apple, but my current focus is on the software infrastructure that enables TV, and Apple is certainly in that picture. Lots of Apple iOS apps for pay TV viewing on mobile devices, and "2nd screen" apps that enable mobile devices to enhance the viewing experience on the TV (not to mention iOS apps for Netflix, Hulu, Youtube, Amazon, Lovefilm, Dailymotion, etc etc).

    Then of course, there's Apple TV's completely inexcusable user experience (scrolling through a matrix of characters to do a search?!), given that much of Apple's success is built on usability.
     
    Last edited: Jan 28, 2015
  19. Atmospheric

    Atmospheric Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    Eugene
    Man, do I ever feel your pain brudda.

    My list of pet usability peeves includes an unbelievably pokey mouse drive that requires two (!) third-party add-ins just so I can use it without having to pick it up repeatedly. Guys, all you have to do is scale the response to the display size. One parameter.

    Then there's the whole questionable notion of always having menus at the very top of the display, but have them change context with app focus. This is problematic on large displays because the function (menu command) you want might be at the opposite corner of the display from where you are actually working. Not so much of a problem on a 14" display, but a huge freakin' annoyance on a 27" display.

    Then they broke Target Display Mode in Yosemite. Yes, I wrote a shell script that corrects it (sort of), and had cron run it once per minute. But that is such a gross hack, I cannot even adequately describe my disappointment in Apple's QA over that. And yeah, because they don't monitor the support forums, I'm not even sure they realize they broke it.

    Lastly, as a diabetic, I was unpleasantly surprised by the IOS 8.1 update, which completely removed blood sugar tracking from healthkit. No warning. Just gone. After using it for a month. So while Apple claims that my data is not lost, it might as well be because there's no easy way to get it off my iPhone. Thanks guys. How many millions of diabetics are there in the world?

    Sheesh.

    OK, I'm going to go discuss something slightly less irritating: brickwall limiting in hi-res downloads.
     
  20. Rolltide

    Rolltide Forum Resident

    Location:
    Vallejo, CA
    Apple owes a lot of people a big apology for the 2010 15" Macbook Pro. At this point the catastrophic problems with the video cards are proven, and they're going to lose in court. Other then that, I find their hardware rock solid though.

    I kind of got a laugh over your anecdote about superior customer support in the late 80's/early 90's though. I'm surprised Sculley didn't answer the main contact number personally. That was back when Apple was basically a small business that built computers for schools. Hard to compare that to what they became when got the bright idea to bring Steve back.
     
  21. CARPEYOLO

    CARPEYOLO Forum Resident

    Location:
    Los Angeles
    I just solved an airplay dropout issue I was having the other day. I'm using an appletv and airport extreme so your results may vary but here's what I did:

    Applications > Utilities > Airport Utility

    Click on the Airport Extreme (or whatever router appears) and some stats should come up. Click Edit. Go to Wireless tab, click Wireless Options.

    Change the dropdown for the 2.4ghz Channel to 7 (or anything other than automatic)

    Change dropdown for 5ghz channel from automatic (mine is arbitrarily at 48).

    Click Save, Click Update.

    My airplay has been much more stable the last couple of days.

    Another supposed fix is that when you're in the Wireless Options menu, create a separate 5ghz network by checking the box at the top. Then connect all your devices streaming to airplay to your network that is NOT the 5ghz version of your network.

    Hope this helps.
     
    Atmospheric likes this.
  22. tvstrategies

    tvstrategies Turtles, all the way down.

    Jeez, have you been thru this too? Sorry to hear... And yes, totally agree that otherwise, Apple HW is rock solid. They'll be finding these things in caves in the year 10,191 alongside Woody Allen's VW and firing them up together.
    Naah, Sculley was pretty full of himself, wouldna stooped to that. He was never quite there in meetings either. So true what u said about how the place changed after Jobs came back. And now there's a whole generation between then and now. People that have no inkling of the early days and what fun it was. Work hard, play hard. Valley isn't really that way anymore. Now it's owned by advertisers.
     
  23. Rolltide

    Rolltide Forum Resident

    Location:
    Vallejo, CA
    I dunno, I have a pretty great time in that culture today myself! Work hard play hard still seems like the mantra.
     
  24. tvstrategies

    tvstrategies Turtles, all the way down.

    Yeah but OUR fun was better than YOUR fun ;-). :hide:

    (Plus you drive allaway from Vallejo? My commute was just from San Ramon, though 680 was 2 lanes)
     
  25. Werner Berghofer

    Werner Berghofer Forum Resident

    This problem also is present when using Apple’s “Remote” software on an iPad/iPhone to access an iTunes library on a Mac via the Home Sharing protocol. Most of the times just a gray box with the album title and the artist’s name instead of the album artwork is displayed.

    The quality of Apple software has deteriorated sharply during the last few years.
     
    Last edited: Jan 30, 2015
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