Car stereo sound quality via bluetooth

Rimsy · 23 May 2013 at 23:59

Quick question - hows does sound quality compare if playing music via your phone connected with bluetooth v's aux cable?
I guess its probably a "depends on car / phone" type question but generally speaking is it noticeably inferior?

mattyg · 24 May 2013 at 00:01

Depends on car, phone, bluetooth version and what player is on the phone.

Saying that i'm happy with mine and I used to be an audiophile

Audio I said AudioPhile

Marvin · 24 May 2013 at 00:20

Given that Bluetooth is a digital transfer, not analogue, I'd imagine it will sound the same, if not slightly better, depending on how good your phone's audio out is. Quality will depend more on the car's speakers, but it won't be worse than the aux.

RedMogg · 24 May 2013 at 01:06

Prefer it to my Galaxy's cd player - but I'm playing FLAC on a Samsung Note 2, so the quality is there in the first place.

scratch · 24 May 2013 at 09:52

Marvin said:
Given that Bluetooth is a digital transfer, not analogue, I'd imagine it will sound the same, if not slightly better, depending on how good your phone's audio out is. Quality will depend more on the car's speakers, but it won't be worse than the aux.

It's not that simple. Just because Bluetooth is digital doesn't mean the sound you hear will be the same quality as the source; data bandwidth can be an issue transferring music over Bluetooth.

Some Bluetooth kit just can't manage higher quality audio (depending on Bluetooth version) as it has to compress the source audio down to a rate it can handle. As a rule of thumb, the earlier the version of Bluetooth you're using, the worse it will sound, due to the more limited bandwidth and higher compression required.

In fact taking what you say about quality of speakers, you may actually find that music over Bluetooth sounds worse on expensive high-end speakers because it makes the compressed audio more obvious to you ears.

Howard · 24 May 2013 at 10:04

Marvin said:
Given that Bluetooth is a digital transfer, not analogue, I'd imagine it will sound the same, if not slightly better, depending on how good your phone's audio out is. Quality will depend more on the car's speakers, but it won't be worse than the aux.

On the contrary, it can potentially sound quite a bit worse due to the compression involved.

paradigm · 24 May 2013 at 10:09

Quite happy with my Audi MMI 3G+ and iPhone 5 combination. My biggest gripe is the lack of control I have with Bluetooth over say using the dock connector.

I believe the issue is that iOS 6.x uses a newer Bluetooth version compared to the car, iOS 5 is supposedly ok, but obviously I can't check this.

Skilid · 24 May 2013 at 10:09

I was going to say wouldn't it be lower due to the transfer speed of Bluetooth?

Conscript · 24 May 2013 at 10:15

Sounds no worse than CD to me.

Uncle_Gravy · 24 May 2013 at 10:28

Bluetooth to my stereo sounds perfect.

Jonnycoupe · 24 May 2013 at 11:30

EliotG said:
I was going to say wouldn't it be lower due to the transfer speed of Bluetooth?

Its typically faster that CD quality bitrate anyway.

Rilot · 24 May 2013 at 11:43

In my vehicles, A2DP bluetooth sounds better than aux.

Tom_ed1987 · 24 May 2013 at 13:38

It depends on which version of the A2DP profile is supported by both the device and headunit. Old revisions sucked. The newest are far higher bandwith and virtually indistinguishable from a CD.