AirPlay to HomePod

[RBM (René)]

I believe Airplay is always shown as high quality (even though ALAC 44.1/16 technically is lossless indeed).

In His Master’s Voice:

Playback of 44.1 kHz/16 bit material not bit-perfect over AirPlay?

It looks like we always consider AirPlay to be “High Quality” as opposed to “Lossless”. Thinking back, I remember why. There are two reasons for this: Many popular AirPlay devices perform internal format conversions that we know to be destructive (example: all AppleTV models convert 44.1k->48k). Since AirPlay streams are clocked at the source, they must either have fancy adjustable clock hardware that can conform to the stream coming from Roon, or they must perform DSP to resolve the clock di…