Am I imagining things, or does Aha have a higher bit rate than Pandora has?

Although I'm having difficulty zeroing in on the music preferences, what I'm hearing sounds generally better than Pandora.

 

I have not tried Aha yet. But Pandora seems to play at what sounds like a great quality playback rate for my ears. That goes for my RLX, my wife's ILX, and the TLX loaner I've had now since Thursday.

I'll give it a shot tomorrow and let you know what I think.

 

It's hard to find time to fiddle with Aha too very much because it's alien to me and the car's usually moving, but I have a sneaking suspicion that we are missing something by not looking at this more.

I still have the feeling that they're using a higher bit rate than Pandora uses, and there are a lot of features and menus that are available in Aha that nobody seems to know about.

I'm assuming we don't know about it because we're not talking about it. :-)

You might want to connect your iPhone like it's an iPod, and play around with Aha a little bit. I think you're going to be surprised what it does.

 

So far the best audio I have heard from the Krell system is the the FM HD stations. I have listened to a lot of Pandora and some CDs but not any AHa. The problem is that the HD signal seems to come and go quite a bit. Also, I found that when the signal is strong enough you can find several "sub" HD FM chanels from the same FM station [several menus deep in the audio screen]. The HD band is big enough for a station to broadcast several other stations in the same bandwidth which our radio will pick up.

Also, according to the manual, if you rip a CD to the car's hard drive it compresses the music and there is less info [sound quality] for play back. I am not enough of an iTunes guy to know if the same is true when you rip CDs into iTunes and place them on an iPhone or iPod.

 

Now you've perked my interest, I'll definitely give it a try.

One thing I did notice is the TLX Info/NAV system has a much higher bit-rate support for any of the iOS tones/alerts/UI sounds that play through the system when paired via Bluetooth (e.g. ring tones, email alert sounds, etc. etc.). And it's MUCH faster about switching into "receive" mode when doing something like using the voice/speech input for typing text/emails, or other iOS voice-activated commands. the entire experience seems much more fluid and seemless, where as the RLX (once again being slow to process) is clumsy and can sometimes take an extra second or two to engage and switch over to "receive" mode.

 

Most of us will be able to tell the difference between music put on the HDD at 128K and music put onto an iPod at 256K AAC, which is really rather good.

Good enough for most of us, anyway. :-)

 

And you definitely have your system set up to use the iPhone's tones, not the system's tones?

Please, are you talking about the length of time it takes after you say, "Hey SIRI" for it to show up on your upper 8" screen?

In my car, I can start talking before it's obvious that the car has latched onto an iOS function, but I might get annoyed because after I've said a couple of words the car will say HANG UP because that's where the highlight's landed when the 8" screen switches to the PHONE menu for you.

:-/

Yeah. It's not perfect.

 

George - I have seen you talk about the use of Siri with the RLX's HandsFreeLink system a couple of times. I am well-versed in iOS and electronics in general, but I cannot make my car's HandsFreeLink system respond to my iPhone 5S or make the phone's audio output come through the car's speaker unless I am making a phone call, so I can't get Siri to talk through the car speaker. I may be just getting old and stupid, and/or I am missing some critical setting. The phone works fine with phone calls, getting texts (though not replying to them), sending music by BT, etc. But Siri doesn't like to have her voice played out loud. Any ideas on what I might be missing? I am running iOS 8.

 

I posted the various bit rates for XM vs FM vs HDD, etc on another thread. XM is the worst. The FM stations have variability in the bit rate they choose for HD.
Best quality is CD by far. I'm disappointed that they did not provide a higher bit rate for recording to HDD.

 

I'm on an iPhone 6 with iOS 8.1.1. I can't swear that it works with your phone, but it works with mine. :-)

The iPhone must be plugged into a power supply, and it must be connected to your car's Bluetooth, and the iPhone must be in a position to be able to hear you when you say, Hey SIRI.

After you say, Hey SIRI it might take ½ s for you to see on the upper 8" screen that your Bluetooth has come on. You might also hear the car say, "Hang Up" because that is where the highlight lands.

You can issue your command at that point.

 

Keep in mind that Pandora has a higher quality setting, at least it does on my Android phone. I'm also a subscriber. The music quality is quite good IMO when listening through the ELS system on our MDX.

 

Dumb question: Does Bluetooth throttle the bit rate? Or is it same rate as the streaming signal

 

It CAN throttle/compress it. Though I doubt you're doing anything over 320 kbps which is around the limit for bluetooth if I'm not mistaken.

 

LOL.... I had no idea!

I've turned it on and will see how much that changes things on my next commute...but that won't be until Friday.

Do you know the bitrate with "Higher quality audio," by any chance?

 

Not very encouraging, but we'll see.

 

Hmm. I have only tried this using the iPhone undocked and invoking Siri manually with the Home button. It never occured to me that invoking Siri using the hands-free "Hey Siri" function (which I have turned off because it's too easy to invoke accidentally) would behave any differently with the Blietooth connection. I will try it your way tomorrow.

 

I tried Pandora and Aha in the car yesterday based on this thread. I haven't tried using Siri yet. With both, I connected my iPhone to the car via Bluetooth.

While Aha sounds better to me on the Krell system in my car, it is more cumbersome to use offline. I am finding that if I plan to listen to an Aha station in the car, I have to have signed in to Aha on my iPhone 6+, and the station I choose preselected, otherwise the car misses it. Once connected, though, the process to change channels is the same between Aha and Pandora.

Pandora is far easier to use for me, and is likely what i'll be sticking with. Reading above that streams on mobile devices are 64 kb, however, makes me far less likely to pay for the service.

With either, you are forced to use the upper screen to control music. The lower screen is completely useless in this regard once you've chosen the source, other than to "like" or "not like" the music. I suppose this forces your attention to the upper screen, and therefore closer to the road....and I suppose that's a good thing.

Still exploring.....

 

Don't forget to make sure somebody's basting the turkey while you're out exploring.

 

"With either, you are forced to use the upper screen to control music. The lower screen is completely useless in this regard once you've chosen the source, other than to "like" or "not like" the music. I suppose this forces your attention to the upper screen, and therefore closer to the road....and I suppose that's a good thing."

I think they screwed up the UI. Explore this: Every list that you can scroll through with the jog dial is limited when underway, i.e., you cannot go to next page - Except for the music interface. You can scroll through a whole album list.

 

Pandora vs. AHA brings out yet another navi system interface snafu.

Pandora:
Top screen


Touch screen


Aha:
Top screen


Touch screen


Both the top and touch screen interfaces are different between Pandora and Aha. If I want to change stations in Pandora, I can use the top screen/jog wheel, but also have the option of touching the single arrow in the station name on the touch screen. If I want to do so with Aha, I can only use the touch screen. Worse, in using the touch screen, I have to touch the relatively small "station" button, then the list of stations pops up. Why can't I change stations on the top screen, which would honestly be easier and safer (I can do it while keeping eyes on the road, by feel)? There are other differences too, in a situation that could use some consistency.

I also verified that one can't change the location of icons in the audio selection screen.

Seems these interface issues could be corrected with a system upgrade?

 

Ouch. User Interface 101 says don't confuse the user. And that means that similar functions should look and work the same everywhere. Especially if the screens look and work approximattely the same, having small differences causes a kind of discomfort, even if you can't identify exactly what the problem is.

Thanks a lot, neuronbob, now you've got me looking for UI glitches!

 

I have several stations that show up as FM "nn.n-1", and have a small single digit numeral in a square box to the left of the frequency. But I can't figure out how to get to the additional substations. What is the control for this?

 

You are referring to HD Radio, which allows for multiple substations. I seem to recall that the substations appeared on their own, and I was able to select them simply by pressing the tune button. I'll scramble out to my car in the morning to re-figure it out; I've now got multiple substations as presets.

 

I will have to check tomorrow when I am in the car but you need to go to a sub menu. I believe it is in the lower screen on the left side. There is a round button on the touch screen that says something like "more". Pushing it shows a menu with all of the sub HD channels. You can then simply push the volume button on the steering wheel to the right and go to the next FM HD channel.

 

Pix taken and a brief video filmed. Should be up later today.

 

I'm not getting texts. Is there something I have to set on the phone?

I have an iPhone 6, with iOS 8.1.1.

 

Pics and a video as promised:

Here are my FM presets with HD radio substations:


On this screen, you can see the substations (1-3 below the station name). You can change between the substations by pressing on the double arrow:


Video demonstration

 

Something broke between 8.0 and 8.1, and it stopped working.

But even back then, you could only read the iMessages over the Bluetooth. You couldn't deliver any of the stock replies.

 

I can live with not sending them. But, I would really like to be able to review them when they arrive. If I remember right, I have to ask for them to be verbalized -- I can't actually see the text.

Maybe a future update will fix it. But, I don't know if Apple broke the interface, or corrected a problem. I've seen cases where an interfacing system relied on erroneous behavior, and when the erroneous behavior was fixed, the interface broke.

 

You know, I'm not really an advocate of reading iMessages while you're driving, and certainly not of sending them while you're driving.

But I just happen to know that there's an iPad holder that's fully adjustable and screws into the centre cup holders.

:-)

Just saying.

 

Video fixed again.

 

HUD graphics are big enough that people will probably believe us when they say they're clear and visible.

:-)

 

Re: Text Messages and iOS 8.1 - I can still receive (receive only, not respond) text messages after upgrading to iOS 8.1 with an iPhone 5S.

Re: Software bugs allows features, sort of - I have tried and tried to get Siri to speak over the BT system, per George's healful instructions. But I only get her to wake up the BT system after "Hey Siri" (and only while powered) the first time after turning on the car, and even then the system just hangs up and loses the connection. I am convinced that this is an unsupported feature that works for some people and not for others, based on who-knows-what in the software or settings.

 

Well.

That's disappointing on both counts.

Because I'm sorry your Hey SIRI doesn't work, and because I'd like to be able to read the iMessages on the 8" screen the way I did on my first RLX.

 

I guess with flaky software and unsupported functions we each get one out of two!

 

I have figured out what I was doing wrong in not seeing HD subchannels, and thought I would post it in case others had the same problem. Being unfamiliar with HD Radio, when I saw a station that looked like "99.9-1", I assumed that that meant there was more than one substation (else why not just display the "99.9"?) but of course it's the "-1" that indicated that the station is, like HD TV, a digital channel and not an analog channel, not that it has multiple subchannels. So I was looking for subchannels for stations that had only the one channel, so the menu items for subchannels were grayed out.

It turns out that the only indication for multiple HD subchannels is that the little "HD" symbol in the lower frequency tuning control (the one you would use to seek up or down) changes to "HD-n" with the number of subchannels available (see neuronbob's pictures above). The seek control (or a "more" or "menu" selection) will go to the other subchannels. I should have know that "99.9-1" by itself does not mean multiple subchannels. My bad.

 

Oh god..I complained about that the first week I got my RLX last year. Definitely one of the more annoying bugs in the system.

Cmon Acura...give us an update already.

 

I was really hoping this would be a part of next cars, Apple CarPlay.

Link:
Apple - CarPlay

 

You might very well see that at some point. A nice side effect is that it would lower the price of news cars more than marginally, because if everyone accepted that kind of idea then you would no longer need proprietary infotainment systems and all of the hardware that goes along with them.

There's still a few things to work through, however. You have big car companies with all of their security concerns trying to interface with Apple, Google, Samsung and Motorola and all of their security concerns. Although Samsung and Motorola are both using Google operating system programming, the way that they do it is different, and you would also have the problem of interfacing with the proprietary firmware enhancements that Samsung insists on doing.

Could you, in good conscience, go with Apple CarPlay while ignoring the Google equivalent of that?

Maybe. But I'll bet you that there's a better than even chance that you'd hear from the federal government if it ever appeared that you were favoring a particular operating system. You wouldn't want car companies to appear to be a part of a huge trust-like, Crown monopoly-like conspiracy to promote Apple at the expense of Google.

And even if you could get away with promoting only Apple CarPlay, we all know that any iOS upgrade could very well suddenly cause the entire system not to work.

There's no point in buying into this 100% unless it reduces the MSRP of the car, but if an iOS update causes Apple CarPlay + Honda not to work any longer, and you don't have a proprietary Honda infotainment system on the car any longer, then where would you be, with a customer stuck out there in his commuting life with no navigation and no music?

In a perfect world....

We can't even get SIRI to work right, or work the same way across our very few thousand RLX's, we've discovered.

 

If the car companies ever did manage to offer cars that relied on your smartphone for navigation and entertainment (unlikely anytime soon, as George correctly points out), I would still opt to pay extra for the built-in system. As much as I love my iPhone and find it to be almost completely reliable, "almost" is not really good enough for my car. Aside from the security and reliability issues, the built-in system knows enough about the rest of the car to lower the radio volume when on the phone, provide diagnostics, override what's on the heads-up display with incoming or outgoing phone call info, and generally optimize in favor of doing fewer things always well (particularly those things related to driving) instead of doing more things almost always well.

Yes, the iPhone has more up-to-date points of interest, but that is not the only important feature of a navigation system. Constant updates - some of which are guaranteed to break stuff - are nice for some features, but a conservative approach to updating software (perhaps not quite as conservative as Acura's) increases reliability.

I would absolutely welcome CarPlay in my Hybrid, and undoubtedly use it for many things that it does better than the built-in system. But I would welcome it as an add-on, not a replacement.