They are all great in terms of reproduction but Airplay… At least with my setups sound seems to be somehow muffled or softened… This happens with both ATV4 and ATV3 to my Yamaha receiver.
It also happens with embedded Yamaha Airplay protocol.
When I switch to DNLA input of the same device (bypassing Roon) sound is crystal clear.
All tests I did are via ethernet cable.
Apple told us that Airplay is a lossless protocol but it shown in Roon chain as downsampled one (green light, and not the bright sparkle I have with Sonos or Chromecast…)
It happens with 44/16 FLAC, ALAC and WAV files too…
While I can’t speak on how the Yamaha Airplay implementation works as we do not have one in-house, a quick tip to ensure you are getting the highest sound quality from the AppleTV is to make sure that you have the volume in Roon set to ‘100’ for the device.
Airplay uses “lossless” encoding to transfer the audio, however that does not necessarily mean that the devices are processing the stream in a bit-perfect manner. For example, the AppleTV internally converts the 44.1 kHz stream to 48 kHz for processing, generally something you’d want to avoid if you can. Because of all of the quirks we’ve discovered with Airplay devices, we denote them with the “High Quality” indicator.
Thank you John.
I’ve just tried your suggestions but no chances here to have a natural sounding experience with this Yamaha… Maybe it is something dealing with their implementation in the Yamaha WXA50 at this point…
I also recently experienced Airplay issues: stream goes nuts… A sort of “slowed-down intermittent” reproduction… This happens with the Ethernet cable, so I don’t think is something dealing with connection, also because from the same plug Netflix flows awesomely (and I think it needs more bandwidth than Roon)
Are you planning any integration with the MusicCast protocol maybe?