In my experience AirPlay 2 isn’t flawless, pretty much every time I try to use it there are stutters.
This is using an iPhone 16 Pro to AirPlay to a stereo pair of Sonos Five’s that are connected using Ethernet.
AirPlay isn’t a great choice if you are concerned about audio quality anyways - if you’re using AirPlay 2 you’re using 256kbps AAC, so it should sound the same as Bluetooth (or worse if you are comparing something like LDAC).
Buy an older Apple TV, or an Amazon Fire. Connect them to your receiver and you're good to go. Or buy a newer Yamaha or Denon receiver and they'll be ready to go out of the box.
Sonos Amp / Port act as airplay receiver to analog out (with amplifier in the case of Amp). They're meant to act as an input for existing ‘dumb’ speakers/amplifiers/home audio systems, and is extraordinarily fit for that purpose.
How do else could one Airplay to a ‘dumb’ stereo without something to act as an airplay receiver?
AirPlay is as about as good as it gets I think. It’s been thoroughly reverse engineered so there’s lots of open source tools for it and it’s cheap to add speakers since used AirPort Expresses are still supported AirPlay targets.
That makes it easier, but no. Many implementations of both servers and clients (both closed and FOSS) exist, for example AirMusic adds AirPlay casting support to Android and I’ve heard of people using rPi’s as receivers. The protocol is entirely local, there’s no remote server component at all.
Agreed but it has better sync tech than most others that I have tried. Yamaha's is buggy, Denon's buggy, but Apple TVs sync well in my multi level, multi system set up.
Works from Apple and Google mobile devices with Spotify