How much would a DAC improve iPhone to car stereo lossless streaming playback? (1 Viewer)

[Ronald Epstein]

My favorite place to listen to music is in my car.

I have a Lincoln with a 14-speaker Revel Audio system that sounds spectacular.

I have been downloading Hi-Rez lossless music from Qobuz to my iPhone for playback in the vehicle.

Also been streaming lossless music from Apple. Now that Verizon is no longer slowing down high-usage streaming I can splurge on the audio quality.

However, the connection is USB to lightning and I really don't know what kind of loss there could be in that connection.

Would purchasing a DAC for the iPhone significantly improve the sound in my vehicle?

If so, which one would you recommend?

Thank you in advance

 

[JohnRice]

Does the car have an analog input of any kind? I seriously doubt it would provide any tangible improvement, but if you wanted to try it, you'd probably want a headphone DAC. The type that connects to your computer and you plug your headphones into. Adapting the iPhone to that might be a little weird, not to mention unwieldy.

Maybe @Dave Upton has suggestions.

I doubt it's worth it for the car environment.

 

[Ronald Epstein]

Does the car have an analog input of any kind? I seriously doubt it would provide any tangible improvement, but if you wanted to try it, you'd probably want a headphone DAC. The type that connects to your computer and you plug your headphones into. Adapting the iPhone to that might be a little weird, not to mention unwieldy.

Maybe @Dave Upton has suggestions.

I doubt it's worth it for the car environment.

Thank you, John, as always.

No, only USB-A and USB-C connections

There is no headphone jack on the iPhone but there is a lightning -> headphone dongle that I could get if it would improve the audio.

Kind of sounds like I'm probably getting the best audio quality I can get in the vehicle.

 

[Dave Upton]

Thank you, John, as always.

No, only USB-A and USB-C connections

There is no headphone jack on the iPhone but there is a lightning -> headphone dongle that I could get if it would improve the audio.

Kind of sounds like I'm probably getting the best audio quality I can get in the vehicle.

@Ronald Epstein - are you using CarPlay?

Either way, without an analog input, you won't want to touch this. The DAC is built into the car and tied into the DSP engine that feeds all your speakers, so you can't do anything about it unless your system has an aux input available.

 

[dpippel]

Ron, I'd be willing to bet that even if you can do this, any possible improvement would be canceled out by the fact that a moving vehicle is simply not a good critical listening environment. I doubt you'd be able to hear any real difference in a blind test. Leave that stuff for a dedicated two-channel home system or a good headphone rig.

 

[Dave Upton]

Ron, I'd be willing to bet that even if you can do this, any possible improvement would be canceled out by the fact that a moving vehicle is simply not a good critical listening environment. I doubt you'd be able to hear any real difference in a blind test. Leave that stuff for a dedicated two-channel home system or a good headphone rig.

It depends on your car and the DAC. Moving from a terrible Bluetooth implementation to an aux input via DAC can be a massive upgrade. My Acura TL has great upgraded speakers in it, but the factory bluetooth is awful.

I use a Qudelix 5K to feed my car stereo via AUX input, and it's a dramatic improvement.

 

[Ronald Epstein]

@Dave Upton and @dpippel thank you for the responses

Yes, using Apple CarPlay to access Apple Music and Qobuz.

I appreciate the help, guys. And as disappointing as the responses are as far as getting anything more out of my vehicle music playback, you have actually saved me $$$ and that's a good thing!

Too bad I don't have an aux input in the Lincoln.

 

[Stephen_J_H]

@Dave Upton and @dpippel thank you for the responses

Yes, using Apple CarPlay to access Apple Music and Qobuz.

I appreciate the help, guys. And as disappointing as the responses are as far as getting anything more out of my vehicle music playback, you have actually saved me $$$ and that's a good thing!

Too bad I don't have an aux input in the Lincoln.

I use CarPlay and stream over my phone rather than downloading the music from Apple Music, but find that it can be connection dependent whether or not you can get lossless over your network [I have a very good cellphone data plan]. As others have noted, even a Lincoln [which typically has great isolation from road noise], is not ideal for audiophile listening, as road noise can sometimes force us to use mild compression to keep quiet parts listenable over car sounds. Save lossless for home listening. I cap my streaming over 4G [my network doesn't support 5G yet] at AAC 256 kbps, which is more than adequate in my RAV4.

 

[dpippel]

It depends on your car and the DAC. Moving from a terrible Bluetooth implementation to an aux input via DAC can be a massive upgrade. My Acura TL has great upgraded speakers in it, but the factory bluetooth is awful.

I use a Qudelix 5K to feed my car stereo via AUX input, and it's a dramatic improvement.

Yep, a lossy connection like Bluetooth is certainly going to sound noticeably worse than what you're doing in your Acura, or a wired CarPlay connection streaming lossless Apple Music or Qobuz such as in Ron's case.

Ron, I'm assuming that you're using WIRED CarPlay. Is that right?

 

[Ronald Epstein]

Yep, a lossy connection like Bluetooth is certainly going to sound noticeably worse than what you're doing in your Acura, or a wired CarPlay connection streaming lossless Apple Music or Qobuz such as in Ron's case.

Ron, I'm assuming that you're using WIRED CarPlay. Is that right?

Oh, absolutely.

In fact, it's created a difficult situation for my daily driving.

I love wireless Apple Carplay. However, I can't take advantage of it because I hate and refuse to use Bluetooth for audio.

I mean, you have this hefty lossless signal that you are channeling through this narrow Bluetooth pipeline and so much audio information gets lost.

So, yes, absolutely, I am using a wired connection to the vehicle.

Also, Verizon has just updated its top-tier plan that promises you can use all the data you want and you won't get throttled. So I can use GB upon GB of lossless data and not worry that Verizon is going to cap me. It FINALLY happened after all these years of hoping someone would offer unlimited data for music streaming.

 

[dpippel]

Same here with wired CarPlay, but I've got about 100GB of downloaded lossless Apple Music on my phone that I listen to while driving. I find it's easy enough to refresh the playlist and update it on the phone when I need some new stuff. Don't like to stream in the vehicle, and if I want to listen to something different there's always SiriusXM (ha!) to fall back on.

 

[Ronald Epstein]

Same here with wired CarPlay, but I've got about 100GB of downloaded lossless Apple Music on my phone that I listen to while driving. I find it's easy enough to refresh the playlist and update it on the phone when I need some new stuff. Don't like to stream in the vehicle, and if I want to listen to something different there's always SiriusXM (ha!) to fall back on.

Quite a bit of my downloaded music on the iPhone is directly off of CD and at about 800kbps. However, most of it is at 360kbps which I find to be a great alternative and I generally don't like to go below that bitrate.

I never wanted to stream music until Verizon recently updated my plan and said I could use as much data as I want. So, I turned on the maximum streaming settings for Apple Music and Qobuz. I am assuming that I'll be getting lossless audio with a wired connection while streaming.

As for SiriusXM, it's basically background music. It's a horrible service both for its sound quality (at 64kbps) and the endless repetition designed for keeping familiarity with the listener.

 

[Stephen_J_H]

Quite a bit of my downloaded music on the iPhone is directly off of CD and at about 800kbps. However, most of it is at 360kbps which I find to be a great alternative and I generally don't like to go below that bitrate.

I never wanted to stream music until Verizon recently updated my plan and said I could use as much data as I want. So, I turned on the maximum streaming settings for Apple Music and Qobuz. I am assuming that I'll be getting lossless audio with a wired connection while streaming.

As for SiriusXM, it's basically background music. It's a horrible service both for its sound quality (at 64kbps) and the endless repetition designed for keeping familiarity with the listener.

Most of my CD-ripped music is ALAC and peak bitrate average is around 840kbps.

 

[JohnRice]

FWIW, I loaded up a bunch of music on a thumb drive and play back from that, completely independent of my phone.

I just prefer it that way.

 

[dpippel]

Quite a bit of my downloaded music on the iPhone is directly off of CD and at about 800kbps. However, most of it is at 360kbps which I find to be a great alternative and I generally don't like to go below that bitrate.

I never wanted to stream music until Verizon recently updated my plan and said I could use as much data as I want. So, I turned on the maximum streaming settings for Apple Music and Qobuz. I am assuming that I'll be getting lossless audio with a wired connection while streaming.

As for SiriusXM, it's basically background music. It's a horrible service both for its sound quality (at 64kbps) and the endless repetition designed for keeping familiarity with the listener.

SiriusXM is most definitely a fallback service for me. My wife loves it though, so we have a subscription. I don't use it often.

 

[Ronald Epstein]

FWIW, I loaded up a bunch of music on a thumb drive and play back from that, completely independent of my phone.

I just prefer it that way.

You would be a good person to talk to about this as I have been trying to do the same thing.

I bought a 1TB external SSD drive

I had to format the drive in one of the Windows file formats as the vehicle only recognizes one of them. Forgot which one it was but it wasn't an issue. Got it to work.

The problem I found is that if I just copy music over to a hard drive and try to play it in the vehicle, there is no menu structure to it (like you get in iTunes where you can play by artist, song, or playlist).

I do have a Mac program called EXPORT ITUNES which does an excellent job pulling all your iTunes music to a hard drive and keeping the original iTunes structure when playing off the drive.

The problem with the latter is that there are so many songs that are DRM protected and that the software refuses to copy over to the drive. I would have to physically locate and redownload over 300 songs in a non-DRM format and to be honest, I just don't have the patience to sit here and do all that work.

So, I am wondering what the best way is to copy music to a drive and be able to have an iTunes-like menu structure to play my music.

I would love to get all that music off my iPhone so I don't have to spend so much money on additional SSD space.

 

[JohnRice]

You would be a good person to talk to about this as I have been trying to do the same thing.

I bought a 1TB external SSD drive

I had to format the drive in one of the Windows file formats as the vehicle only recognizes one of them. Forgot which one it was but it wasn't an issue. Got it to work.

The problem I found is that if I just copy music over to a hard drive and try to play it in the vehicle, there is no menu structure to it (like you get in iTunes where you can play by artist, song, or playlist).

I do have a Mac program called EXPORT ITUNES which does an excellent job pulling all your iTunes music to a hard drive and keeping the original iTunes structure when playing off the drive.

The problem with the latter is that there are so many songs that are DRM protected and that the software refuses to copy over to the drive. I would have to physically locate and redownload over 300 songs in a non-DRM format and to be honest, I just don't have the patience to sit here and do all that work.

So, I am wondering what the best way is to copy music to a drive and be able to have an iTunes-like menu structure to play my music.

I would love to get all that music off my iPhone so I don't have to spend so much money on additional SSD space.

Ron, for DRM music, your current solution (playing back with the DRM compatible iPhone) is the only option I'm aware of. I have no DRM music, so for me it's not an issue. My music is all from CDs or purchased from HDTracks, which are DRM free.

Or, you can load only non-DRM music on the drive, which you probably already know.

 

[Scott Merryfield]

FWIW, I loaded up a bunch of music on a thumb drive and play back from that, completely independent of my phone.

I just prefer it that way.

I do the exact same thing.

 

[JohnRice]

BTW, I got one of THESE thumb drives, which are so crazy small they barely protrude beyond the USB slot. Only enough to have something to grip on. Max of 512GB, but I do all 320Kb/s mp3s in the car, so plenty of storage. I used to use a 2.5" SSD but this thing takes up no space.

 

[Ronald Epstein]

BTW, I got one of THESE thumb drives, which are so crazy small they barely protrude beyond the USB slot. Only enough to have something to grip on. Max of 512GB, but I do all 320Kb/s mp3s in the car, so plenty of storage. I used to use a 2.5" SSD but this thing takes up no space.

John,

Is there any menu structure that you can search for songs or play by a playlist?

All that is done with iTunes and without it, it seems like you are just scrolling through files of music.

What do you recommend as far as direct copying to a drive and playback organization is concerned?