airplay united ? 

Sorry,Stan.It was a bad joke from my side.I promise to behave myself 

Stan wrote:

I have a 2nd hand Essence Mk2.  I started messing around with Airplay 2 recently, and found that when I try to add it as an Airplay 2 device, it prompts for a password. 

You can password-protect your AirPlay network to stop rogue users connecting. For example, if I try and stream to my Apple TV, it will ask me for my AirPlay password.

This is either your iCloud password or a separate AirPlay password you created.

I had the same issue and by trial and error I figured that it was the A9 name in setup that was causing the issue. Either it was too long or some special character.

try changing the name to a short name and see if it works.

I think there was some firmware upgrade or ios update where specs changed and the default name started causing issues.

Thanks to all for the responses (even Old Jack).

I think I will need to do a factory reset.  This one Essence, named "Pool", is the only one in my network to have any issues (Eclipse, BS2 and another Essence, with a longer name, all work fine).  My guess is that there must be some remnant of configuration information left from the previous owner as it is 2nd hand.  It looks like, at one time, the software supported an interface for setting this password, but now it's gone.  I guess I will try the iCloud password before resetting as well, but I don't know why this device would ask when none of the others did.

Having said all that, I'm not sure if it's worth the trouble since I'm not sure what (if any) advantages Airplay 2 gives me... this was my reason for messing with it in the first place.  I have a mixed house of Apple and Chromecast and B&O.

Sorry Stan..I read your message again and realized the issue was related to Essence and not A9.

The issue was that trying to stream to A9 was asking for password on the ios device even though I had not set any on A9 or any other place. In my case changing the A9 name fixed the problem.