Quote Originally Posted by erland View Post
Have you tested or do you think you would be able to hear difference between a lossless file and a 190kbps MP3 in the car environment ?

Just asking to get a feeling how good your car audio environment is, because if you can't hear difference between a lossless file and a 190kbps MP3 a bluetooth solution might be good enough because there might be other components limiting the system more than the bluetooth does.

I'm personally fairly sure that both MP3 and bluetooth is good enough for a lot of people, the question is just if it's good enough in a listening room setup for people that really care about audio quality. For bluetooth to replace Squeezebox in my home from an audio quality perspective, its really important that it at least doesn't result in that my FLAC files sounds like MP3's or even worse.
No, I've never done a listening test in my car to see if I can tell the difference between mp3 and lossless in my car. Honestly, even in my home listening environment, I have to listen very closely to notice any difference so I'm sure I wouldn't hear it in the car. In the car, it's more important to me that I have variety, not the absolute best quality. As long as I don't think "wow, this sounds bad" when I put the music on in the car, I'm happy. Sirius XM made me think that, so I never listened to it.

What I was more concerned about in the car was the impact of compounded compressed encodings of the audio stream. In my car, I couldn't hear anything.

I recall reading someplace that there is (or will be soon) a version of bluetooth that supports lossless encoding of the stream. In that case, it would be theoretically possible to be lossless from the source right to the DAC in the player. That would be cool to have in the car, but even in the home, I'd still perfer my squeezebox at this point.