kingdave

Three weeks ago I picked up a 2013 Audi A5 for the wife. It came equipped with the MMI Navigation and a 505W sound system. I took over the '07 IS250 with Nav (but not ML) that she'd been driving. Now when I'm driving it, I'm overcome with a terrible case of stereo envy. I try not to give it much thought and just when it subsides, I get back in her car and it flares up again. The downside is that Lexus just replaced the motor in the IS250 a little over a year ago plus I'm a full-time telecommuter so I don't have a valid reason for trading it in just yet.

Are there any options for making it comparable short of finding a donor car with a ML and spending countless hours swapping parts and running wires?

andyville

Well, as someone who just bought a 2015 LS 460 Crafted Line with the ML audio system, my personal opinion would be to stay the heck away from the ML audio system. It simply is the poorest sound system I've had in any car in over a decade and I've had a lot of cars, most of them with the stock sound systems. It's THAT bad... as my wife says "sounds like a transistor radio sitting on the front center of the dashboard... and she's right....

NickTee

ML sounds very good, that sounds like a case of either a broken stereo component or poor input choice. Many times, the better the stereo system the worse low-quality music sounds. What was once perfectly fine now sounds terrible. That's not to say that you need to run FLAC file CDs only, but at least 256kbps.

andyville

I initially thought something HAD to be wrong with it. So much so that I took it back to the dealer, and we got in an identical LS 460 and compared the sound in it with its ML audio system. It sounded identical to mine... Basically when you switch SURROUND Sound to ON, the only speaker you can hear is the front center dash speaker, which is completely the opposite of what you'd expect.

To be able to hear any of the other speakers, you have to fade it 3 or 4 notches to the rear. That certainly isn't indicative of an audio system finely tuned to the unique surroundings of the car. Turning SURROUND off actually makes it sound slightly better, but you still have to fade it WAY to the rear to get a somewhat balanced sound. Again, the comparison car on the lot was exactly the same in terms of sound and how it had to be set up. I traded in a 2013 M5 with the stock sound system and it blew away this ML system, by a longshot!

NickTee

What are you using as a source? If it's not a 5.1/7.1 source, switching it to surround is not going to replicate a 1 or 2 channel across all speakers, it's going to be looking for a 5.1/7.1 source to decode and send specific channels to specific speaker groups.
What you're looking for is stereo, which would simply be playing a 2-channel source through all speakers. It sounds like having the surround setting being off makes it stereo and surround setting being on makes it a true surround, which seems right. Stereo is just going to surround you with music, surround is going to be able to decode and stage the music as it's meant to be. But it needs to the right information to do that.

andyville

Well, I've tried CDs and DVDs (set to the 5.1 setting), and certainly CDs and DVDs sound better than radio or MP3s. However, the same balance and surround issues are still there. Even with a 5.1 DVD when I turn Surround ON, boom, it seems like all the sound you can hear is from the center dash speaker. Turn Surround OFF and it's a bit better, but nowhere near what I've heard in other cars... My BMW M5's stock sound system had a much more pronounced and balanced surround effect. I've finally gotten to the point that I've resigned myself to the fact that this simply is a pretty lame sound system. And that's pretty frustrating with all the hype about it...