With a bit of time on my hands, I’ve done a bit of tinkering today and thought I’d share my findings, if anyone is interested...
1) Tried replacing the stock VW USB cable with a genuine Apple one to see if there was any difference in audio quality via CarPlay. There wasn’t. Said cable then became firmly stuck in the USB socket eventually only removed with sheer brute force and a pair of pliers. Original VW cable safely reconnected and working. Won’t be doing that again!
2) As I have both Apple Music and Spotify Premium on trials which expire soon, I’m trying to decide which one I want to keep. While playing back the same tracks from both, I noticed a few things worth mentioning:
3) The built-in Spotify EQ passes through to the car and merges with the Dynaudio EQ. The Apple Music EQ does not, that appears to be treated as Flat when connected to CarPlay.
4) The Spotify EQ, when manually adjusted can make Dynaudio sound horrific. To test this yourself, manually slide the Spotify EQ curves for 40Hz and 1KHz to maximum (not that you’d ever put it there, but bare with me). It distorts like crazy, confirming another of my suspicions that Dynaudio mids are a bit hot, particularly in Authentic.
5) With the Spotify EQ set to Off (so I’m literally comparing Apples with apples), I found Apple Music over CarPlay to sound both louder and clearer (note Apple Sound Check is Off, Spotify Sound Normalisation is also Off). I prefer Spotify’s suggestions and playlist’s but I think I’ll be sticking with Apple for the slightly better sound quality (NB over headphones, there’s nothing between the two - seems to be the way Dynaudio handles the encoding better with Apple than with Spotify). Also to note, both were using downloaded tracks at their maximum bit rate, rather than streamed.
So there you have it, some useless information that may be of use to someone out there.
