5.1 AirPlay Speakers

[dchao]

According to Apple, the new AirPlay speakers feature:

Send audio content from Apple TV to AirPlay-enabled speakers and devices (including AirPort Express and other Apple TVs).

At the beginning I was very excited, because I thought I could have the video part streaming to my TV screen and audio part streaming to my speakers.

However, I can only do it with music and not movies. If I want to just hear music through my AirPlay speakers, I could control it on my Mac or my iDevice, which is far more convenient.

I am very disappointed.

What do you think? is the new AirPlay speakers option useful?

 

[nwcs]

I wasn't too surprised. I figure with all the lag created by going back and forth they couldn't keep the video in sync with the audio. Honestly, don't see much value in the feature but maybe it was very easy to do since most of the stuff was already there?

 

[Wheeler]

I was excited if you could use multiple speakers at same time, but nope. Nice addition but way too cumbersome to replace just airplaying from iDevice.

Useful for those with multiple appletvs but no iDevices I guess.

There is volume control for the airplay speakers

 

[iAladdin]

Thank you for letting us know. I have been waiting to buy an Apple TV (with an Airport Express) for a couple of months now, just for this feature and was rather exited when I learned of the update yesterday. Now that it doesn't seem to work as I had hoped it would, I have no use for an Apple TV at all. (projector on one side of living room and an analog audio system on the other side).
In another thread on this forum I read that it actually does work for music video's, so it seems Apple deliberately blocked the feature for other audio sources. And from what I read in reviews of the beta it worked for all Apple TV generated audio. Perhaps they didn't get it working reliably enough.

At least it saves me some money With the purchase of an iPhone 5 this Friday it was already going to be a very expensive September, so I should probably thank Apple for not fully supporting this feature

 

[c2c4c]

I don't understand the purpose of the feature if this doesn't work. It would seem the whole point would be to get video out of the ATV and send audio to an airplay device at the same time.

Am I missing something?

 

[warvanov]

I have my Apple TV in the living room hooked up to the stereo and another set of speakers at the other end of my apartment hooked up to an AirPort Express. It might come in handy to be able to play music on the ATV to the other speakers, although I don't know if it continues to play audio through the ATV while sending audio to another device.

With that said, it would be absolutely amazing to be able to send audio from movies and TV shows to the speakers at the other end of the apartment, so that I wouldn't miss dialogue when getting up to grab something from another room.