jzqj55

Still hard to believe that people believe that a Music source of a thumb drive or a Bluetooth connection is suitable for an audio system like the Mark Levinson option
I treasure the hard drive in my 2009 Mark Levinson system which was eliminated in the 2010 model year. The other luxury brands recognize the value of a built-in hard drive taking music from a CD without losing fidelity

dal20402

Thumb drive is just fine if your files are encoded decently. Lossless, or MP3/AAC above about 256 kbps, are good enough on almost any type of music. At that level or above no one has shown the ability to choose the uncompressed source consistently in blind tests, except for certain music with very complex waveforms.

I play my music through my iPhone. It's encoded 256kbps AAC and sounds terrific. The only place I can tell the difference between 256kbps AAC and the original digital source on my home system is in harpsichord music.

Vansibel

You are wrong, the music get compressed when it get copied to the car HD in the 2007-2009 car and in a pretty ****ty format too (WMA). Personally I can notice immediately the loss of quality when it's ripped on the HD even at 256kb. Some mp3 from a thumb drive will sound much better than this. The best option is either CD, Audio DVD (best option IMO as you can fit much more uncompressed music than a CD and you can up the sampling rate), or lossless format like FLAC from a phone/pc stick hooked through the HDMI port of a ivic setup. Wifi streaming in some case wont compress audio (if you stream for example a flac file) so it's much better than bluethooth as a wireless solution.

tlk2megoos

This is true, I have considered my HD useless due to this flaw. If you rip your music to the HD, you will notice unbelievable clipping and compression compared to the optical media. You're much better off using the AUX cable to your media device. With a system as good as the ML in this car (the ML systems in the other Lexus lineup pale in comparison), it'd be a travesty to subject yourself to mediocre audio.

dealyodas

Thanks. I never knew that but everything sounds better on the ML. That's one of the reason I had to go back to a LS460 from a LS430. I loved the sound system balance.