Hopefully, I have some thoughts to add to this thread and I can learn some things from all of you...

I am looking to possibly purchase my first Lexus vehicle ever. It would be the 2022 NX.

For me, the quality of the stereo system is one of the very first things I look for when comparing luxury vehicles.

I am nearing the end of my Lincoln lease. It has an exceptional Revel audio system inside of it that pumps out what I would describe as an unbelievable sonic experience. You really feel like you are listening to high-end audio.

I was really hoping Mark Levinson would be equally as good, if not better.

Now, I'm hearing it's probably not. While I realize that the 2022 NX will get the premium ML system, it won't be the more powerful system that exists in the top Lexus models.

Still, I would hope that most of you would have rated it better.

Satellite radio is garbage. The bitrate on it is so low, it essentially sounds like an old transistor radio on high-end systems. You absolutely cannot judge any car system with satellite radio.

If you really want to test your system out, you should be streaming something that's at least 320-360kbps (Spotify Premium or Apple Music). CDs are at a higher bitrate than that and music services like Tidal or Qobuz offer even better high-resolution audio.

 

nice.

the ML system definitely is different in each lexus, so i wouldn't concern yourself with comments in this LC (a very small 2+"2 garden gnomes" car space) forum.

preach on! total crap.

because our LC's here (and several others lexus!) still have CD players in them, lol, i think i'm going to dust off some of my CDs to listen to them in the car!

 

and then, we'd all remember from the article we'd read, that FM radio, being analog all the way, more accurately measures the ML's performance .... than even CD's ....

 

what android phone do you have?

what article?

 

I've noticed this with several vehicles, and several cellphones, most recent being Samsung. I don't mind the aux cord, but otherwise I have found BT to have inferior fidelity. I've more recently found some BT related settings in settings/developer mode, so when I return home next week I'll see if those tweaks help. I'd much rather enjoy the convenience of BT if the fidelity can be improved. Especially since aux inputs are disappearing. I was pleasantly surprised that the LC had one!

 

i'm still surprised you can tell much if any difference because you're connecting a headphone output from a phone (using the cheapest possible DAC) into a line in (aux) input, that most likely goes through analog to digital conversion anyway (so EQ and other settings are possible) before being converted back yet again to analog to send to the speakers.

i don't think you have a '21, because with that you can use android auto and thus feed the digital music directly into the car over usb. i also have a third party wireless android auto device (which isn't bluetooth, it actually creates a wifi network, so plenty of bandwidth) so i get full digital audio bandwidth over a wireless connection.

 

Yes, mine is an '18. The other thing is my phone won't do music through USB.

Used to be Aux that was better. I don't know how much BT has improved lately.

https://theauris.com/blogs/blog/aux-vs-bluetooth
https://www.lifewire.com/bluetooth-a...ctions-4076519

 

Some day soon I hope we can look back and have a little laugh at how complicated we have made things. It’s coming, so much progress.

I do wonder how the hardware “decides” which DAC to use.

I did turn off surround today, not a long drive but it did seem to improve things.

 

For a cheap way to have a DAC in the car you can pick up a used LG phone on swappa.com - they came with a DAC. if you plug it in and use android auto it should sound better, especially if you have Tidal.

 

any phone with a headphone jack has a DAC because that's an analog output.

 

They do, but LG put a ES9218 Quad DAC in their phones for better sound.

 

My experience has been that using Tidal as a source makes an immediately recognizable improvement in whatever vehicle I have tried it in.

So what it’s come down to is which DAC is doing the processing? Is it the DAC of the phone, an “outboard” between the phone and the car, or in the head unit of the car?

If we connect to the car by USB, that’s a digital signal so the DAC in the car is doing the work. If we connect through the headphone jack and an accessory input of the vehicle, that’s analog so the signal is being converted by the DAC in the phone.

If we use an outboard DAC (maybe the easiest way to be sure we have one of elevated quality) then we know it’s doing the task.

Wireless starts automatically when we turn the car on, no cables to fiddle with. But that means the DAC in the car’s head unit is doing the processing.

Have I missed something? Or is this how we can determine where the digital signal becomes analog?

Looks like the best sound solution is a high quality source such as Tidal (there are several) and an outboard DAC connected between the phone and the car. I have not tried this yet. Has anyone here?

Only this week realized that Tidal is on Carplay. Moved that Icon to the front screen.

 

sure, makes sense, it's a HIGH quality digital stream.

car head units are not like high end old school systems with analog pre-amplifiers, amplifiers, etc. i have little doubt that internally, the car processes everything digitally, so even if someone uses an outboard DAC and feeds it into the AUX input of the car, the car most likely just converts it back to digital and then back to analog at the 'end' before the amp or speakers.

good article on this:
https://mynewmicrophone.com/are-aux-...acks-the-same/ including this:
"... due to the digital nature of many audio devices, there are often analog-to-digital converters immediately at the jacks of both headphone and auxiliary ports."

how could one get Tidal to (digitally) feed an external DAC?

 

 

^^^ thanks. only $300 lol...
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