Is AirPlay not Capable of Playing Red Book Losslessly?

I always understood AirPlay 1 and 2 could play resolutions up to 16/44.1, but looking at my signal path it changes from lossless to high quality:

It’s not a huge issue obviously as I only use the B&W A5 for background listening but I’m just curious. Thanks for any answers.

From what I know even if they can do that (airplay 2 being better) they use a protocol that it is adjusting the resolutions (I guess upon connections speeds or computers) so while it can do it can go lower. Maybe that is the factor why airplay is high quality and not loses. I do use for living background music a Yamaha via airplay from roon, connected by ethernet cable but still there is the green dot.

Hope someone has a better answer

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Straight from the horse’s mouth:

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Thanks, René.

And sorry, I should have found that thread before starting a new one.

I am a bit confused about this rationale. The protocol itself is a network protocol that is capable of delivering perfect bits, is it not? What happens after the delivery is similar to what happens inside a DAC. Should we differentiate between NOS or sigma-delta DACs in deciding the stream quality?
Regarding it being “clocked at the source”, I assume that means the receiver cannot dynamically adjust the transmission rate. Assuming that’s true, isn’t that also the case with direct connections like S/PDIF or AES/EBU? Clock recovery can be done with buffering and PLL. Not only is that not exactly “DSP”, it can again be considered part of DAC internals.

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