Versatile speaker options, family control, and easy music access for friends

You can select more than one speaker or speaker set in the Music app for playback in multiple rooms.

Image credits: Shura - Polydor Records.

Once you’ve got the AirPlay bug, you won’t just want a single AirPlay device all on its lonesome, you’ll want AirPlay in every room of your home. Once you start adding multiple AirPlay receivers, some interesting things become possible including multiroom audio.

You can use AirPlay to create multiroom audio in two ways. You can share the same audio to multiple speakers in different rooms. For example, you might want to play the same song at the dining table and in the kitchen.

To do that, it’s just a matter of selecting multiple speakers in the AirPlay pop-up in the Music app’s Now Playing view.

In most cases that works flawlessly, but when you stream the same thing to multiple speakers you may discover that some of your speakers are very slightly out of sync with one another so, for example, your kitchen speaker may be slightly out of sync with the ones in your living room. If that’s a deal-breaker some third-party speakers, such as B&O models, have adjustable latency compensation to deal with this.