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Technical Topics iDrive, Nav, Phone, Audio, Video, Cameras, Electronics Harman Kardon + Apple CarPlay + Amazon HD

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      12-21-2019, 02:58 AM   #1
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Harman Kardon + Apple CarPlay + Amazon HD

Guys I have HK in my G20, I also have Apple CarPlay and Enhanced Bluetooth. Using the latest iPhone I'm looking to get the best out of the sound system.

I've signed up and started to use Amazon HD, so my question is -

Are the benefits of the HD/Ultra HD tracks being played back at their best via wireless AppleCar play? If not how do I force playback via USB assuming this will be better?

Any help would be great.

TIA
Charlie.
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      12-21-2019, 09:36 AM   #2
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Quote:
Originally Posted by SwissTone View Post
Guys I have HK in my G20, I also have Apple CarPlay and Enhanced Bluetooth. Using the latest iPhone I'm looking to get the best out of the sound system.

I've signed up and started to use Amazon HD, so my question is -

Are the benefits of the HD/Ultra HD tracks being played back at their best via wireless AppleCar play? If not how do I force playback via USB assuming this will be better?

Any help would be great.

TIA
Charlie.
Think of it this way... if someone was only a mediocre-to-poor cook; would providing them with top-shelf ingredients make a difference in their end result? It wouldn't hurt!

As for your specific situation; why not experiment and tell us what you find? Does sound quality change when you connect via usb? Does sound quality change when you connect via Bluetooth and don't use CarPlay?
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      12-21-2019, 10:32 AM   #3
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Quote:
Originally Posted by glennQNYC View Post
Quote:
Originally Posted by SwissTone View Post
Guys I have HK in my G20, I also have Apple CarPlay and Enhanced Bluetooth. Using the latest iPhone I'm looking to get the best out of the sound system.

I've signed up and started to use Amazon HD, so my question is -

Are the benefits of the HD/Ultra HD tracks being played back at their best via wireless AppleCar play? If not how do I force playback via USB assuming this will be better?

Any help would be great.

TIA
Charlie.
Think of it this way... if someone was only a mediocre-to-poor cook; would providing them with top-shelf ingredients make a difference in their end result? It wouldn't hurt!

As for your specific situation; why not experiment and tell us what you find? Does sound quality change when you connect via usb? Does sound quality change when you connect via Bluetooth and don't use CarPlay?
The one thing I'm not sure how to is to force the music via CarPlay USB rather than wireless CarPlay...is CarPlay only wireless?
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      12-21-2019, 01:44 PM   #4
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CarPlay is wireless only. If you plug the phone via USB you can use it as a USB source for audio playback.
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      12-21-2019, 03:46 PM   #5
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Quote:
Originally Posted by JayPichardo View Post
CarPlay is wireless only. If you plug the phone via USB you can use it as a USB source for audio playback.
Ok great thanks for confirming
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      12-21-2019, 09:18 PM   #6
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I think a lot of people assume Wireless carplay is using only bluetooth - but Wireless Carplay actually uses Wifi not Bluetooth to communicate. While it does use Bluetooth for the initial connection, the interface and audio streams over Wifi.

Bluetooth A2DP is not high quality (320 Kbps max bitrate or 0.3Mbit/s), but if you have higher quality audio streaming over Wifi to the car, Wifi should be able to handle it just fine.

For reference, the max bitrate of FLAC audio (with 8 channels) which is a lossless codec and greater than CD quality is ~37Mbits/s - even Wifi from 2003 (802.11g) can send data at 54Mbit/s - and most likely the Wifi in the G20 is at least 802.11n that has a max transfer speed of 600Mbit/s. Even though you normally wouldn't see the maximum 600Mbit/s on 802.11n, you still should easily get 100Mbit/s which is more than enough.

Uncompressed CD quality audio with 2 channels is only about 1.5Mbit/s and even "High Res" audio is only ~9.2Mbit/s -- suffice it to say, you have nothing to worry about with a wireless Carplay setup.

With all the background noise from tires, wind noise, etc while you're driving - and considering the HK system sounds good but isn't anywhere close to an audiophile system, I doubt you'd be able to tell the difference between CD quality audio and anything above that like High Res audio.
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      12-22-2019, 01:00 AM   #7
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Does that mean you must have your hotspot turned on and have good WiFi coverage for CarPlay to work?
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      12-22-2019, 01:10 AM   #8
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Liquid_Ice View Post
I think a lot of people assume Wireless carplay is using only bluetooth - but Wireless Carplay actually uses Wifi not Bluetooth to communicate. While it does use Bluetooth for the initial connection, the interface and audio streams over Wifi.

Bluetooth A2DP is not high quality (320 Kbps max bitrate or 0.3Mbit/s), but if you have higher quality audio streaming over Wifi to the car, Wifi should be able to handle it just fine.

For reference, the max bitrate of FLAC audio (with 8 channels) which is a lossless codec and greater than CD quality is ~37Mbits/s - even Wifi from 2003 (802.11g) can send data at 54Mbit/s - and most likely the Wifi in the G20 is at least 802.11n that has a max transfer speed of 600Mbit/s. Even though you normally wouldn't see the maximum 600Mbit/s on 802.11n, you still should easily get 100Mbit/s which is more than enough.

Uncompressed CD quality audio with 2 channels is only about 1.5Mbit/s and even "High Res" audio is only ~9.2Mbit/s -- suffice it to say, you have nothing to worry about with a wireless Carplay setup.

With all the background noise from tires, wind noise, etc while you're driving - and considering the HK system sounds good but isn't anywhere close to an audiophile system, I doubt you'd be able to tell the difference between CD quality audio and anything above that like High Res audio.
My friend this is superb info and feedback. Although you have assumptions there about the WiFi bitrate, it makes sense.

Will check it out, as you say once in the car actually being able to tell is one thing, but it's supplementary using this in the car I mostly wanted to try it out for my home set up.

Cheers
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      12-22-2019, 02:49 AM   #9
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So does that mean that you have to have your hotspot turned on and need good WiFi coverage to listen to Spotify even if it’s music you’ve previously downloaded?
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      12-22-2019, 04:47 AM   #10
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Chuckyarla View Post
Does that mean you must have your hotspot turned on and have good WiFi coverage for CarPlay to work?
Do you mean the hotspot option on your phone or on the car?

The answer to either though is no, for your phone - Wireless carplay essentially turns your phone into a hotspot for the car automatically (although it is Wifi Point to Point between your phone and the car instead of turning your phone into a Wireless Access Point which allows multiple Wifi connections to your phone)

On the car side, you don't need to have the Wifi hotspot option to be able to use Wireless carplay. So it isn't required.

As far as having good Wifi coverage - I don't know what this means? When you enable Wireless Carplay, you setup a point to point connection between the phone and the car. The phone and the car are talking directly to each other and create the Wifi connection, no coverage is needed.

BTW- If you want to test this for yourself, setup Wireless Carplay on your phone/car and then turn Wifi on your phone off and you'll lose the Carplay connection. Or if you turn on the car and your phone has Bluetooth on but Wifi off, the phone will ask you to turn Wifi on to connect to Carplay.
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      12-22-2019, 04:52 AM   #11
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Chuckyarla View Post
So does that mean that you have to have your hotspot turned on and need good WiFi coverage to listen to Spotify even if it’s music you’ve previously downloaded?
No - the Wifi being used is automatically setup between your phone and the car, you don't need to be close to a Wireless router or anything like that.

Wireless carplay will obviously work better when you have a Cellular data connection because any apps that require an Internet connection, like say for instance Waze or Google Maps - can route you dynamically based on traffic conditions, but needs an Internet connection to get the traffic data.

However, if you downloaded music previously on Spotify, it wouldn't use your Cellular data connection to stream the music, it can simply play the music you've downloaded already on your phone. This is important because if you downloaded the music from Spotify at very high quality, and then are playing it over Wireless carplay, you'd still by playing the high quality downloaded version of the music.
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      12-22-2019, 09:37 AM   #12
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Thank you for that information - very informative. Do you find that Spotify works well in the car? How’s the HK sound?
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      12-22-2019, 10:08 AM   #13
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Chuckyarla View Post
Thank you for that information - very informative. Do you find that Spotify works well in the car? How’s the HK sound?
I'm honestly not an audiophile or anywhere close to it - the HK system in my car sounds fine, it doesn't sound any worse than the F30's HK system in my opinion, but I'm not playing it at very loud volumes so I can't tell you if the lower wattage on the G20's HK system makes it any worse.

I also typically play Spotify at the "Normal" setting which is only 96Kbit/s so I probably am not even able to tell the difference between Bluetooth and Wireless Carplay.

I did do a bit more research and found that while Wired Carplay streams audio in LPCM format (essentially raw uncompressed audio), Wireless Carplay streams audio in AAC-LC format (other choices are OPUS or AAC-ELD but both are intended for voice and not music). This is at least true for the initial spec of Wireless Carplay.

AAC-LC is a lossy audio format and if you're playing something like Spotify it is still compressed audio, even if it is on the High Quality setting. So the bad thing is that it probably has to recompress the audio to AAC-LC which can result in even more degraded audio.

I say probably because its possible IOS is smart enough if the audio is already in AAC LC format to simply pass it onto the head unit.

So - while Wifi should easily be fast enough to stream a 2 channel PCM stream, or they could have used ALAC (Apple's non-lossy audio format similar to FLAC) it seems that Apple decided to use a lossy codec for Wireless Apple Carplay. It is entirely possible that this has changed over time, and newer versions of IOS support something other than AAC LC for media streams, but everything I've read suggests AAC LC is what is being used.

This is still a lot better than using Bluetooth a2dp which is limited to 320Kbit/s, but is not as good as using LPCM since it probably re-encodes audio to a different format. So I'd put Wireless Carplay in the middle between Bluetooth audio and Wired Carplay.

Again with all that said - I don't actually think most folks would notice the difference when you're driving the car with all of the other noises going on along with the HK system probably not being good enough.
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      12-22-2019, 12:53 PM   #14
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Once again, thank you for such a detailed reply.
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      12-22-2019, 08:08 PM   #15
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Connected Carplay, not wireless, will get you the best sound
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      12-23-2019, 02:08 AM   #16
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Benjamin_Nicholas View Post
Connected Carplay, not wireless, will get you the best sound
Is connected CarPlay possible in the G20?
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      12-20-2023, 12:06 PM   #17
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Chuckyarla View Post
Is connected CarPlay possible in the G20?
It won't because G20/G21 doesn't support wired CarPlay connection
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