There are various ways of playing your music wirelessly these days. Most devices have Bluetooth, but this has several big disadvantages compared to the options provided by Google and Apple. Bluetooth uses a lot of battery power from your mobile phone, and also it is not able to send lossless music, which is a major setback for music lovers. On addition to that it also compresses the music it sends (Audiogurus, 2016).
Google Cast sends the music straight from the servers of Google, therefore you don’t need your device to be active. This is different with Airplay and Bluetooth where the music itself will be send from the phone which will have a negative effect on the battery life. Google Cast has the option to send lossless music until 24bit/192khz which is the highest standard possible (Google, 2016). This is the only possible option to send your music in this high quality to your speakers. Apple Airplay is also possible to send lossless quality but only until 16/44khz which is inferior to the quality that Google Cast provides (Apple, 2016) Bluetooth is not able to send lossless quality due to the fact that it does not support such a high bandwidth.
Apple Airplay is fairly Apple centric, but has the advantage that it is already around for a couple of years. This enables Airplay to be able to connect to a lot of different devices because manufactures have enabled airplay in a lot of devices from stand-alone speakers to receivers and tuners. Google Cast has been announced only 2 years ago, so only the most recent devices are Google Cast Enabled. Google is trying to solve this problem by releasing its own Google Cast enables hardware such as the Chromecast and Chromecast-Audio (Google, 2016). As Spotify connect is only able with a Google Cast device, it has another advantage major advantage over Airplay (tweakers, 2015).
If Google continues to update Google Cast it has a clearly major advantage over Apple Airplay, with its native Spotify, lossless quality and low battery live.
Audiogurus, 2016. Bluetooth audio. Available at: http://www.audiogurus.com/learn/news/bluetooth-audio/3176
Apple, 2016. Sound quality Airplay. Available at : http://www.apple.com/shop/question/answers/product/MC414LL/A/i-have-a-fairly-hi-end-stereo-system-will-sound-quality-thru-airport-express-to-my-system-be-degraded/QH7XYCT9PXYAH7TKA
Google, 2016. Chromecast. https://www.google.com/cast/
Tweakers, 2016. Spotify voorziet apps van chromecast ondersteuning. https://tweakers.net/nieuws/105742/spotify-voorziet-zijn-apps-van-chromecast-ondersteuning.html
