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Comment by chgs | Hacker News Reader

“Which USB cables are used. Some seem to be better than others.”

You are imagining it.

Are you sure about that? Because there are some extreme examples, for instance some USB cables won't work at all for Android Auto. Then some USB cables I had music skipping, and with at least 1 cable the quality seemed much worse for Apple CarPlay than for the best one.

It's a digital data stream. The bits either make it or they dot. Unless the cable is actually faulty (i.e., the error rate exceeds what error correction and recovery can handle), one cable cannot "sound different" to another.

The gold plate-ended USB cables that come in a wooden case with velvet finishing, make the reproduced sound so much smoother, the way yhey were intended by the composer. The glossiness of the gold combined with the subtle soft touch of the velvet will seemlessly flow over to the analog side of the 192kHz DAC, polishing these once harshly digitized signals up to their finest quality.

You are joking, but all I want is the bass to feel really good and immersive in EDM songs. It somehow really makes me happy and the car ride so enjoyable. Like when the bass kind of smooths around you and it feels it's coming immersively from everywhere at once. With some setups the bass kind of does a rough "boom" and goes away quickly, while with others it kind of simmers and tickles you.

I think we are on the same page. The bass is the part that makes a lot of difference. From working in automotive amplifiers i remember that there are tricks to make the bass sound louder and deeper with a limited amount of voltage difference. Usually the mac diff is +14 to -14 volts due to the battery limitation, which seems plentiful but for low tones, the energy efficiency as well as human perception is very low with audio. One of the tricks is introducing first and second harmonics. I've experienced plenty of in-car demos that we would present to customers e.g. in Munich.

Other tricks are speed adaptive eq and volume.

But in the end most quality yield boiled down to tuning. Cars full of, rather low quality speakers (BOM cost a few dollars per channel) could create a quite immersive sound.

That's very interesting to me. Because of this specifically being so weirdly pleasurable. I have now driven a lot of different cars because where I'm locally, you can use an app to rent cars for very temporary times and they are everywhere, within walking distance. Maybe it's in other countries as well, I don't know. But in any case, this has given me so much opportunities to try out various cars from 2021-2023 year release. I only recently got a license, and the car I bought is my first, so I don't have much historical experience, or experience in general, but to me when driving a car this particular audio quality is the main thing to affect my mood and perception. I either feel hyped for the rest of the day or frustrated and disappointed. And I usually don't think of myself as a music fan or anything like that. Also don't think I'm very young, I'm just a late bloomer in terms of getting a car.

Because of that impact, and because of my lack of knowledge, it was very difficult and concerning to find a car, because we are kind of trying out Android Auto, Apple CarPlay, bluetooth without anyone really giving advice on the topic. And car sellers don't seem to be mindful about the topic, neither any relatives that we tried to consult on which car to buy. The best advice car sellers have had on the topic is to "just always use the original cable" which I don't even know what it means. Well I know what it means, manufacturer likely put the proper USB with optimal transfer rates and all, but it doesn't really answer to what the factors are or anything like that.

Are we using wrong settings somewhere? Are we using optimal settings in all the apps, the car audio tuner, equalizer? I don't know.

So we have learned a lot and we decided on a car, which we bought, but presently I still feel there's something different about Android Auto, vs Apple CarPlay, that doesn't make it quite as pleasurable. Like I'm not getting this immersive hype feeling, but more of a rigid "boom". Apple CarPlay showing that the car should be capable of it, but I can't really reproduce it with my Android phone.

But surely I can't be the only one in the World, so it seems like a thing that can be this pleasurable would have been obviously solved.

And it's not about the loudness, it's about how it smooths out or spreads, or feels like it's all around you at any volume. Like you are inside the music and the bass.

When I tried to Google for solving this problem, I didn't really find any answers, so I'm sharing this here on hackernews, since frequently interesting perspectives appear here.

If there's a traffic jam or rush hour, but the music is so great and immersive, it wouldn't matter and you never want the music to end, it seems odd that there's not that much focus on it from sellers point of view or people I know in real life.

Or do I just have a weird physiology/psychology that responds to some odd things that no one else really cares about, or is some small setting somewhere?

One of the songs I would like to test out on a car I would be to buy is "Elley Duhe & Whethan" - "MONEY ON THE DASH".

How is this song going to make me feel in that car with those settings.

It's a song that happened randomly on one of the cars we were renting.

But it really got us both.

Could it be sending a lower bitrate stream over poor cables? Similar negotiation happens at other points of various communication stacks.

That was my thought about part of the process too, like does YT and Spotify use a lower bitrate if you're using usb out vs analog out vs bluetooth? Plus if the data connection is 4g vs 5g or sitting in the driveway using wifi, how does that affect the streaming?

I'm not an audiophile by any means, but streaming almost always sounds worse than CD or even sometimes radio.

Yeah - with bluetooth, definitely there's much, much lower quality in some cases. Initially when trying cars I always used Android and bluetooth, and it gave me very bad impression of some of their audio systems. Then when finally bringing a cable for Apple Car play and using my partner's iPhone, the sound was totally different.

But it does also seem to depend on a car. Because I'm pretty sure I've had some very good experiences with bluetooth as well. And a case where bluetooth Youtube Music sounded good, and bluetooth Spotify sounded bad.

In addition both of these apps have different volume levels despite car having the same volume level, and Android has different volume levels compared to iOS, so all of it combined, testing around made for an annoying experience.

Audio doesn't use very much data. CD bitrate is 1.4Mbps while USB2 is 480Mbps. It would have to super bad to for audio to have problems, and USB2 is super reliable.

The ones I tried were new, of course still could be faulty. I went to the store and asked for one that would divide to both Apple lightning cable and USB-C, so my partner and I could both use it, since she has iPhone.

The store owner said that he's not sure which ones will work, so he gave many different ones which we tried in the parking lot and then brought back. He gave us only one that spreads into 3 different connectors, USB-C, Lightning and the old Micro-USB. He said that this won't likely work. Rest of the cables were all either USB-C or lightning. However when trying, contrary to what he said, the 3 different connectors one worked, and it seemed to also have best quality, e.g. compared to one lightning which definitely had much worse performance.

What I think is happening is that like someone said somewhere below as well, there's some difference in how fast or stable the data goes through the wire and something will change how they encode/decode it for those reasons. I don't know if it's the apps or the car software. I have to assume there's some sort of quality check and something will change depending on that.

It doesn't help that packaging seems to list out random details and it's hard to compare cables with each other. Some USB cables have listed the data transfer rate, some have not, but they do allow data transfer. Then others don't.

Or the car has a fair amount of EMR noise and one cable - being shielded - experiences less loss as a result. This could also explain why bluetooth was particularly bad.

When I asked ChatGPT about it, it also brought up interference as a potential culprit, but I'm not an expert on the topic to consider it or be confident enough to bring it up by myself. I'm not sure how well different materials are shielded from interference or how much effect can interference actually have on it.

What it specifically said is:

> High-quality USB cables often have better shielding, which helps to reduce electromagnetic interference (EMI). EMI can introduce noise or degrade audio quality, particularly in cars where multiple electronic devices are in close proximity.

But I don't know if this is the exact culprit.

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