[ralfd]

I have no great experience with Bluetooth Speakers, but the magic of the HomePod is that they use Airplay 2 which piggybacks on WiFi and has some advantages:

- AirPlay uses lossless compression to stream audio from source to speaker. All Bluetooth audio streaming uses lossy compression.

- AirPlay has the capability of playing across a much larger distance and with a solid connection between devices than Bluetooth.

- When using AirPlay you’re actually capable of controlling the volume of the Airplay speaker (not just the volume of the device which transfers to the Bluetooth device).

- Airplay can stream to multiple output devices. Bluetooth is one-to-one streaming.

- AirPlay caches multiple minutes of Audio (or Video). AFAIK Bluetooth does not cache.

A sibling comment talked about using a Sonos with Bluetooth, but having delay issues. There is no lag on AirPlay:

https://www.reddit.com/r/HomePod/comments/gt4g40/lag/

[thebean11]

I might be misunderstanding, so if all I have are iPhones and MacBooks, this actually would allow me to play arbitrary audio from my devices?

[jb0x168]

Yes. If you use an app like AirParrot, you can do it from windows as well. Can't speak to android specifically but I believe there's an App For That as well.

[thebean11]

Alright, being limited to certain devices seems less bad than being limited to specific apps like Sonos

[jscholes]

> Alright, being limited to certain devices seems less bad than being limited to specific apps like Sonos

Sonos also supports AirPlay, as well as DLNA/UPnP rendering. So for example you can set a Sonos speaker as the output device, wirelessly, in the latest nightly builds of VLC[1].

[1] https://shaleenjain.com/blog/vlc-dlna-support-2/