Truck Audio- Apple Music Loseless or Spotify?

[ScoutingTremor]

Hey all-

Trying out a free trial of Apple Music right now to try out their superior audio quality. While this is mainly for my desk setup with real headphones, DAC, AMP, etc, I am trying it in the truck too. From what I can tell there are 4 levels with varying music quality to input into the truck:

1. Bluetooth to FORD
2. Wireless Apple Carplay
3. Wired Carplay (is this different than wireless?)
4. Wired connection

Does anyone always use a wired carplay connection for better quality? Let me know what everyone is thinking on this one, some people on other forums say do a USB stick with music files... I am not going that far lol

 

[Truckin]

Im to lazy to search but Apple Music is not hd or cd quality. Tital has better than CD quality and Amazon HD is close and I can't tell a difference with a 7k sound system. If your running stock tremor even B&O unleashed Apple should be fine. Lots of variables

 

[Fozzy]

Im too lazy to search but Apple Music is not hd or cd quality. Tital has better than CD quality and Amazon HD is close and I can't tell a difference with a 7k sound system. If your running stock tremor even B&O unleashed Apple should

Tidel is better if you have the rig to enjoy it and they have more songs available at 24. You have to enable the higher bit rate downloads in your Apple settings to get them and downloading is better than tring to stream 24 bit music. The B&O does like the Apple Spatial Audio in surround mode better than regular tracks.

Search revels they do have CD quality, right from their website.
Apple has developed its own lossless audio compression technology called Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC). In addition to AAC, the entire Apple Music catalog is now also encoded using ALAC in resolutions ranging from 16-bit/44.1 kHz (CD Quality) up to 24-bit/192 kHz.

 

[noreserve]

I have an iPhone 14 Pro Max connected wirelessly via CarPlay and the B&O Unleashed system. B&O is set to Surround and bass is one notch down. I haven't really tried going back-and-forth between wireless and wired to test. I do like the wireless convenience and sound quality currently. I can also charge my iPhone even in its Otterbox case if I place it just right and give it a blessing. That phone and case combo is often a challenge with wireless charging. I will throw this out after living with the truck for a few months:

* For general station streaming by music category, I really like Pandora. It sounds very good - much better than I would have predicted. I listen to it the most. I have the Family Premium plan and have been listening on Standard (64 kbps AAC+) for cellular. I changed it to High (192 kbps mp3) today just to see if I can tell a difference. In any case, Standard is quite good.
* I switched from Spotify to Apple Music due to having a lot of Apple devices and their support of lossless and spatial. Spotify was slow to the HD game there and I lost patience. I knew that I was giving up a superior playlist ecosystem and user interface, but it was worth it for the noticeable difference in quality.
* I know that the B&O Unleashed system has been widely panned, but I am pretty happy with the sound quality if I use the right source material. SiriusXM sounds like crap to me on it though. I only keep it for the streaming capability outside of cellular, along with the variety and usage via SONOS at home.
* It's important to compare apples to apples - same phone/app sound quality settings/connection type/B&O mode and tone settings, any sound dampening modifications, etc. There may also be some differences in manufacturing quality, HW and speaker tweaks over time and the like.

On a related note, I'm going to create a separate thread on CarPlay in the F-150 - not that it hasn't been beat to death, but there are a couple of observations I have that have helped me live with it a bit better. Short story - CarPlay in the '23 F-150 is the worst implementation in any vehicle I have experienced.