Tidal is well worth it IMHO. If I think about all the other worthless junk I spend $20 on in a month, I really enjoy the high quality music and getting the most out of my ML audio I paid a lot for.

 

How are you connecting your phone to the car? I believe Lexus is still using the SBC codec, which would make Bluetooth negate any audio quality improvements.

 

I connect using USB. Notable improvement over BT

 

Interesting, I had no idea your LS could recognize a phone plugged into the USB port. I thought that was only for iPods and memory sticks. Does it work with both Android and Apple phones?

 

Nope, when it’s plugged into the USB plug in the console the car treats it as a USB music player. Your ES works the same way, so does every other car I’ve had with a USB input.

Im sure it’s the same with Android.

 

So, you can play music through the Tidal app via USB? I thought you were limited to only locally stored music on your phone.

 

You may download music to your mobile device but you can't transfer that music to a USB drive because you don't own the music. Tidal gives you access to listen to said music as long as you continue to pay the monthly subscription. As soon as you stop paying you will no longer have the ability to listen to the songs you downloaded.

Otherwise, none of the streaming companies would be able to make a profit. Everyone would just download the music they liked and discontinue the service.

 

So to clarify, there's no way to subscribe to Tidal (or any other music service) without using BT or, as Steve states, by using USB input in the car to play through the vehicle radio and using massive amounts of phone data. Correct?

 

You can download music from Tidal to your mobile device while on WIFI in order to avoid using cellular data. Once downloaded to your mobile device Tidal doesn't require cellular data usage.

I have unlimited cellular data usage but prefer to download the music to my mobile device because the cell service in my area is horrible and would cause the music to stop. I downloaded over 50 gigs of music to my mobile device which are separated in about 20 different playlists.

 

So, when you connect your phone to the car via USB, how does it seperate the Tidal downloads from your regular downloads? And all this is visible on the headunit's display?

 

By opening the corresponding app. Yes, the track, artist, album, album art information is visible on the screen.





Carplay image

 

I've tried multiple Android devices (Onkyo DP-X1 MQA player that uses Android as the base OS and a T-Mobile LG V30) the car's head unit will not recognize an Android device. Neither an LS460 nor an LS500 recognize these devices.

 

Yes. You can either stream Tidal or play cached songs. This works both on Bluetooth and USB for an iPhone.

 

That may be because you have to tell Android devices what to do with the USB connection. It might be set to charge instead of act as a music device.

 

Have you gotten it to work with Android? I haven't had a chance to try yet in the 7th gen, but it does not work in the 6th with ML. I'm hoping they corrected that oversight by now.