I recently got my Vaistech SL3B installed and music sound quality is good overall but i seem to be encountering some distortion. It is mostly during rock music with a lot of going on and sounds like a crackling hiss. In music without much going on everything sounds clear and great.

Does anyone else have this problem? Is this a vaistech issue or possibly my phone (galaxy s4)?

 

No crackling or hiss on mine. Also could suspect amp or blown speaker

 

It almost seems to be a bandwidth issue with the bluetooth. Everything sounds great with cds.

 

Nope. Mine is perfect.

 

What device do you use to stream bluetooth? Maybe its my phone causing the problem.

 

If you weren't hearing the distortion before via radio or CD, I'll go the other way and say it's probably the app you're using to stream. Do you have any equalizer settings you can adjust? Either a music player with a built in EQ (Poweramp is my top choice. Also your mention of a BT bandwith issue, Poweramp has settings to tweak such things as well.) or just get DSP Manager which allows you to set the EQ for the different outputs of the phone (Speaker,BT,Headphones) outside of an app. Ideally that should help with your problem.

 

Interesting, I'll have to look into that. Right now I'm using google play music as my music player and it does have eq options but I have eq turned off.

 

Could also be the source material - your mp3s (assuming that is what you are playing through google play that is) Albums are frequently recorded too loud in an effort to sounds more crisp and bass-y to your average listener. This can create distortion on some stereo equipment. But you can fix that...

You can turn down the "gain" on your mp3s using "mp3gain". It's free. Tell it where you've stored your mp3s on your PC. MP3gain will review your music and tell you which tracks are "clipping" and therefore likely causing distortion. You then dial down the gain % you want to lower those tracks. This lessens or removes the clipping altogether depending on how low you go. Doesn't impact the audio quality of the track at all. Just gets rid of distortion. I've used this program on my entire music collection to fix distortion. Before that listening to music in my car from my iPod was painful.

The Galaxy S4 supports the aptx bluetooth audio codec, so it's sending a good signal to the vais unit. I'm guessing the vais unit isn't the culprit either. But I don't know if supports the aptx codec. If it does, then it for sure isn't the vais causing the problem either. You can ask vais if the SL3B supports aptx. Even if it doesn't the other lesser audio bluetooth technologies will frequently provide enough bandwidth to not cause too bad of a loss in audio quality.

 

I've opened up dialogue with vaistech support about this. They said it definitely should not be happening. I have used the same files on a zune using an aux input in another car and everything sounds great so there is clearly something going on with my current setup.

 

Dont have this but give this a shot turn one or two notches down (volume) on your cell phone.

 

Mine sounds great SL3B

 

I did get this sorted.... it was something with my phone. Whenever I connect to bluetooth the first time the sound is crap, I have to turn bluetooth off then back on and all is well.

 

Mine sounds excellent. Using Spotify premium at "extreme quality", sounds better than CD in my opinion. But... it will eat up your data plan gbs if you use cellular data streaming cuz it's at 300+ mb/s. Using free itunes is only 60+ mb/s but quality suffers.