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So i need a wireless speaker for the living room. Sonos One SL is the one i want to purchase.

The thing is, i don’t use any streaming services (maybe a weird thing to say if you’re buying a smart speaker), because i like to OWN my music, to have specific editions of the albums, sometimes a redacted tracklist, etc (also, lots of the stuff just ain’t available on these services anyway).

So with that said, I want to buy One SL to use it with my personal/local iTunes music library (i’m an iMac user, High Sierra 10.13.6 if that matters). To be able to use it as a desktop speaker generally would be nice as well, since my iMac is placed in the same room. 

I imagine the process to be something like this: i click AirPlay, i select my One SL as an output and that’s it. Am i wrong assuming it’s THAT easy? Will it end up being a headache? Will i feel forced to ditch my library and switch to the streaming services (not gonna happen)?

I do realise that my question may sound kinda lame with the obvious answer to it, but damn, something tells me it just can’t be as easy and flawless as the wired connection via the external speaker jack.

Mostly, it is that easy. The one caveat is that not all applications have integrated the API necessary for AirPlay 2 use, so you might run into rare situations in which it won’t work. 

Should i expect any lag? When i read old posts, like more than a year ago, people complain there was annoying delays, like when you hit Play and nothing happens for 1-2 seconds, or when the video is completely out of sync (movies, Youtube, etc). Normally this shouldn’t happen if you’re using AirPlay 2, right?

I’m not sure. I do know that Sonos made some updates with 10.6 of their software to the AirPlay 2 code, but I don’t use it frequently enough, nor in a manner that you could tell. Most of my use of AirPlay 2 is to listen to baseball games on TuneIn Pro, which isn’t currently in season. The other use I have is when listening to podcasts o my iPhone, using Overcast. Neither of these uses allow for delay analysis. If I were to use it for video, I’d be AirPlay 2ing to my Apple TV, which connects via HDMI to my TV and carries to my PLAYBAR via optical. Not terribly useful to you, I’m afraid. 

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