Hegel H120 and Apple Airplay 2

I love the sound of my H120, and of the rest of the system. Even now, I will still look up and think by heck that sounds good. In the same way I would hear the old system and think it's not quite...right, is it?

I stream through a Sonos Connect connected via an optical cable, or an iPad connected via USB.

Since I don't live in a fancy Norwegian house that had Cat 6 cable wired in along with the mains when it was built, and the Hegel doesn't have Wi-Fi (and that was not a deal-breaker) I have a wi-fi extender to connect it to the home network.

In theory I could use AirPlay, but until the last update that never seemed to work. Now it does.

The bit where I choose the Hegel from my Air volume control and the amplifier switches itself to Network and some You Tube commentary comes out of my hi-fi is truly... cute.

But...

But...

But...

The Hegel refuses to play with the other kit on AirPlay. I can group my Sonos One's and the Beam, because they support AirPlay2, but choose the H120 and everything else falls off.

Guys!

You made it work with Spotify Connect.

AirPlay 2 is how Apple offers multi-room hi-fi without having to do all the deals Sonos has done... let me explain that.

Sonos has done deals with a bunch of providers to the effect "You send individual streams to each of the Sonos items our customers have, and we will incorporate your service into our pretty darn fabulous app. Oh, and we sell a LOT of kit." Someone will be kicking back to someone on this deal, but I'm guessing the amounts are fairly small.

Sonos have patented the multi-source, multi-destination, grouping and independent volume control stuff. Google lost a lawsuit badly to that effect in 2021. Apple doesn't have more cash than Croesus because it pays licensing fees to competitors. That's why AirPlay runs through the controlling iDevice and only handles one stream at a time: to avoid the Sonos patents. Apple licenses AirPlay to anyone who asks, so a lot of other hi-fi manufacturers use it to provide multi-room and save themselves the trouble of developing their own. All the streaming service apps offer AirPlay integration. Why pay Sonos when you could be getting paid instead?

I can live without AirPlay, and mostly do. But it would be nice to have the option to do real multi-room streaming to include the Hegel.