Who is kidding who? Once the engine is running and the wheels are rolling almost any system and source will sound about the same in these cars. Just the tire noise alone is a killer. The relatively inexpensive HK system in my EV BMW sounds better on the road, no matter what I'm listening to.

 

I posted this earlier last month and I made the changes to my Apple Music settings on my iPhone (for Car Play of course). I have a Carrera T so it's very difficult to tell as I hear the motor and road noise (as designed), but I think it might be something you should look at and let's know if you can tell the difference.

https://rennlist.com/forums/992/1447...g-carplay.html

 

When background noise makes it hard to hear things, that can be a sign of hearing loss. I’m not kidding.

 

This. Before you start worrying about sound quality in a 992, start to look into sound deadening especially around tire noise. There are some good threads on this here, one of which is from @Bluehighways himself.

 

Say what?

 

It’s best to not make these assumptions about how wireless apple carplay is implemented. Even with Bluetooth, a digital protocol, one would naively asume that music is transmitted byte for byte to the destination but it is not. It is encoded to one of the supported bluetooth audio protocols. Similar with wireless carplay, unless if there’s somebody here who has that first hand knowledge of the implementation of Wireless Carplay, there very well could be an over the air compression for streamed audio that differs between wired and wireless.

That article claims Wireless Carplay streams audio over bluetooth. I’d like to see a second source to back that up though, seems weird to me

 

Yeah, I did a bit of a double take reading that post. You're generally correct that SNR is irrelevant; the signal sent to the car is digital in either case, so SNR can influence the amount of bandwidth available but doesn't have any impact on audio quality unless it's so poor that there's insufficient bandwidth (which should be nigh-impossible, FWIW -- and iirc insufficient bandwidth will manifest as "skipping" rather than quality degradation). But it's not correct to say that the car is sent exactly the same bits the phone receives from the cloud (or your locally-stored media).

(edit: after reading the linked test, I see they're measuring the SNR of the audio, not of the wireless connection. that checks out as a reasonable thing to measure.)

Apple used to have technical documentation available somewhere that detailed this -- unfortunately I wasn't able to find it, so take this with a grain of salt because it's from memory. I believe wired CarPlay transmits an LPCM signal (I saw at least 16-bit, 48kHz, but it may support higher these days) to the car, while wireless CarPlay always re-encodes to (again, iirc) AAC-LC. Thus, wireless CarPlay is lower fidelity compared to wired, without a doubt, and wired does support lossless audio, but only at ~CD quality.

I did find this document, which addresses the availability of lossless audio over wired CarPlay in the FAQ: https://support.apple.com/en-us/118295. Note the absence of mentioning wireless: that's Apple-speak for "wireless carplay does not support lossless audio".