Apple AirPlay’s audiophile Easter Egg

Remake/remodel. Last week’s written editorial about AirPlay’s audiophile ‘Easter Egg’ is now a video. See above. Keen-eyed observers will have seen this remix coming. The written article’s more conversational tone (think: video script) was a dead giveaway, I think, of my future intent. I remade the article as a video as an excuse to try out a new video production technique which hopefully remains invisible to the viewer. If so, the video is a success!

Less successful was my expecting commenters demanding the last soupçon of proof – beyond AirPlay’s bursty behaviour – to look more closely at the on-screen graphs (that were also linked in the YouTube description box) to how the transmission rates stacked up numerically. I had assumed, in this case erroneously, that such deep divers would live for the devil and his details. In other words, “you do the math!”.

Time for an intervention? Looking at the AirPlay 1 graph, we see data transmission taking place at ~100KB/sec. Once we remember that there are 8 bits to a byte, that converts to ~800kbps, which is just enough for lossless ALAC carriage.

AirPlay 2 shows different transmission behaviour. After the initial 3MB buffer load, it engages in bursty transmission of around ~350KB/sec every 10 seconds. That sums to a total of ~2160KB per one-minute interval. Expressed as an average per second, we arrive at 36KB/sec, which is ~288kbps. That’s sufficient for 256kbps AAC but not a lot more.

Unless my maths are off, those graphs show AirPlay 1 streaming at around 800kbps and AirPlay 2 at around 288kbps once its 3MB drop-out-immunising buffer has been established. According to Brother Thomas, AirPlay 2’s lossy transmission only affects Apple Music’s and Tidal’s iOS/iPadOS apps.

My second mistake was not to include in the video the What Hifi quote from May of this year. It features prominently in the original written post and I’ll copy/paste it here to close out today’s video notes:

“However, the news isn’t so good with regards to using AirPlay 2 to send lossless Apple Music streams. Apple Music’s Lossless streams supposedly convert from ALAC (Apple’s lossless codec) into AAC (Apple’s lossy codec) at a pretty lowly 256kbps when transmitted over AirPlay – and therefore not losslessly.”

Further information: I have none

👉 As mentioned in this video…

This video is also available as a written article
📖 https://darko.audio/2023/10/apple-airplay-isnt-always-lossless-sometimes-its-lossy/

Apple Airport Express (discontinued)
📖 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AirPort_Express

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