5 years of ownership and today I dusted off the CDs and dropped in 6 in the frunk. And the non bose stereo that had been very underwhelming on radio was a totally different stereo with the CDs.
Have you tried this?!?! My non BOSE stereo that I thought was total junk actually produced a nice jam session.
Any way to get the radio to perform like a CD?

 

Some ideas:

Original source fm/am? Could be just used to poor radio quality.

Do you have individual audio settings for the cd and the prior music you were using? May be different and sound better.

Either way good to hear! Lol.

 

I also don’t have Bose but I don’t think the quality is half bad when using the iPod connector and bovee Bluetooth.

 

There's two primary reasons a CD sounds best (and always will) and Ipod connections sound better than FM/AM:
- the source frequency bandwidth is completely different - FM tops out around 15Khz compared to CD (around 22-44Khz). Our ears top out at around 16 as a mature adult. AM is far far worse.
- DAC - CD and iPod are using the Porsche head unit DAC, and maybe they invested a few $ rather than cents in a good DAC chip.

CDs remind you of when you used to listen and appreciate the composition of an entire album. Perfect for a drive.

 

Yeah, FM seems to sound worse? I mean, I know it's much lower fidelity than CD, but even compared to my other cars FM just seems worse on my 987.2 with Porsche Sound System Plus.

PCM 3.0 will actually play DVD Audio discs in the head unit. It's kind of a defunct format so there aren't many discs out there, but I got one just to see what it was like (Queen's "A Night at the Opera"). I'm no audiophile but it sounded pretty good to me.

 

Many recent cars have FM HD, an additional allocation of bandwidth for higher resolution FM. This has been in most vehicles since post-2010. That could well explain the difference you are hearing, it's quite dramatic. DVD-audio discs play well, I have several of them - hard to find these days and obscenely priced too. The difference in quality is audible but not worth the premium in the .2 cars, as the rest of the Bose system is pretty terrible. Bose sound is just the sound of marketing in full swing and is not remotely close to any audiophile experience.

Hint: In PCM 3.0, there is some improvement through turning on the 'Linear sound' option, as that removes the Bose processing somewhat.

"All Highs and Lows, Must be Bose".

 

Frankly, not having Bose should be a plus when shopping. Makes it a lot easier and cheaper to get a modern head unit if you so desire.

 

Some adjustments to the content above is required. FM sounds like crap because the broadcasters are using heavy compression which is far worse than MP3 and they also have crap antennas. I had a harmon kardon deck in my 76 capri that kicked butt on FM but that was back when FM was THE platform for broadcast and LP and cassette were the media. Now FM is a dying technology. The HD frequency bands help but there is still horrid compression. CD frequency responst is 20-20KHz. The music is sampled at 44.1 KHz for A to D conversion but when played back the highest frequency is 20k and frankly not very accurate. I prefer hi res formats like 96/24 flac or DSD which is far superior. Any external audio source you connect to your car will sound better than FM or XM (which also suffers from compression due to bandwidth constraints). I use a FiiO M11 hi-res audio player and it sounds pretty amazing as long as the engine isn't running lol.