marques

Hi, I recently joined the Porsche family with a '15 Cayman S and have been playing with all the sound settings in the PCM3.1 (Bose) to get decent sound quality and it has been a little frustrating. Looks like whenever the radio tunes into an HD FM station, the sound suddenly sounds clearer/better, but for some reason all the improvements seem to be in the higher frequencies and the bass is gone. So I try to compensate by turning up the bass all the way up and leaving treble at 0 and it sounds half decent, but still lack bass. But then sporadically the tuner seems to lose the HD signal and defaults back to the non-HD signal, and suddenly the bass is back and overemphasized, while the treble is relatively low. And the signal losses a little clarity,

So, has anyone else experienced this inconsistent behavior while listening to FM? I have pretty much given up on HD and just listen to plain FM. But even then, it seems the tuner is just not very good. The same radio stations sound better and a lot more consistent in my other cars. I have seen the various threads about swapping speakers in the Bose system or taking other steps to improve sound quality, but the way I see it, it doesn't matter how good your amplifiers or speakers are, if the source material is no good (the output of the FM radio), nothing will make it sound better.

saabin

Congrats on the new car.

I'm certainly no audiophile, but I have experienced the HD station in/out that you describe... Not sure if it's the antenna, radio, or what.
I really don't listen to much music in the car, and if I do it's from the jukebox of stuff I loaded when I got the car...
My favorite "station" is the sound of the engine behind me at 7800 RPM with PSE engaged.

ICNU

Mine behaves, the same as the OP, however, it’s not constantly coming in and out as he describes.

Mine may sound crappy for a bit after first going to that station, then it clears up once it switches into HD and tends to stay that way, unless I’m driving far enough away from home that the signal becomes degraded

In this case, it does start to wander in and out of HD signal, which becomes annoying

I spend 99% of my time streaming music from my phone via Bluetooth, so it’s never been a big enough issue for me personally to really care about.

ElCid86

^This. And when I don't have cell connectivity to stream SiriusXm I have some old-school jams on a USB in the glovebox.

"As long as the mood is right...
No static at all (no static, no static at all)
FM (no static at all)" - Steely Dan