I have been readin the forum for a week now and just joined.

I have noticed a lot of people requesting MP3 playback in the 04 TLs. My question is why would you want that?

I understand the volume of songs you can fit in one disc is a benefit but consider this:

MP3 quality is not the highest quality. Though many people do not notice, MP3s do not sound like CDs at all. MP3s are compressed to a nominal amount and with that sound quality is reduced.

With a car that has one of the first 5.1 DVD-A systems, why would you want to ruin it with MP3 playback.

I agree with Acura's decision not to include it as an option or standard as it would somewhat cause the vehicle to lose some of its luxury appeal.

What do you guys think?

 

remember that the vehicle also has a cassette player... we would have much rather had an MP3 player vs that "Luxurious" cassette player it has now...

 

Sorry I missed that the car does have a cassette deck, but even the cassette deck is either THX or DTS certified, which MP3s are not. Correct me if I am wrong.

 

I think you're severely overgeneralizing. It is certainly possible to make an MP3 that sounds like crap, but it's just as possible to make one that sounds excellent.

I had a MP3 head unit (Alpine) in my previous car and loved it. The quality of my MP3s was great and I was able to drastically reduce the number of CDs in the car. One CD was good for a decent length road trip.

I took a CD, compressed a track to MP3 320kbps stereo (using LAME), then converted it back out to uncompressed WAV and burned that track plus the original rip to a CDR. Took it to the car and did constant switching back and forth (with the car off; no engine noise) between the tracks to see if I could hear a difference. I couldn't.

I think the 'sound quality' rationale for not including MP3 presented by Acura is BS. More likely to do with cost (decoder hardware, software support, royalties to Fraunhofer, already spent enough on DVD-A and DTS support, etc.) than anything else.

XM radio is supported, and doesn't sound as good as a CD. XM uses significant digital compression.

DTS CDs are supported. Those cram 6 channels into the space of 2 uncompressed channels.

FM and AM are supported. Cassettes of all things are supported; I don't think I've used one of those since the late '80s.

None of these sources sound as good as a 16-bit 44.1kHz stereo CD, or as a high quality MP3.

Mike

 

You are wrong

The cassette deck supports Dolby B noise reduction, yielding a whole 65dB (if my foggy memory serves) of SNR.

The DTS logo on the system refers to support for DTS-encoded CDs. There is no THX certification of the TL system.

Mike

 

Another "Real" Advantage of MP3 CDs is you can burn the tracks you like in the order you like! And, as svtmike says, you CAN get CD quality if you encode the MP3 right.

 

Not me. I like listening to books on tape. Though more and more are available on CD these days, not having a tape player would be a drag.

What I really wish is they had a cool slide-in compartment for an iPod. I'd gladly give up a cassette player for a way to directly connect an iPod to the stereo.

 

Hey, does Honda/Acura offer an 8-Track player as an add-on accessory? I've got a little Golden Earing - Radar Love to play...think that would be THX certified?

 

I guess I'm getting behind the times, but I don't see the need for MP3. I've been an audio fan all my life, and I find it hard to understand why some one would be pushing for an audio format that is inferior to what is already out there. If you want to have hundreds of songs to chose from use XM otherwise I think 6 CD (total of 72 songs) or DVD's more than suffice plus they sound a hell of a lot better. Everybody seem to be dissing the casette player in the car, but if that wasnt there there would be another way to play "alternate" audio devices (like MP3's!!!!!). Another possibility would be to include a hidden RCA "line level" input in the car but as far as I know no auto manufacturer has ever done that (Iwonder why?).

 

Leave the cassette player alone!

Otherwise how would I listen to the books on tape that I get from my local library?

 

You can do that with the wav quality CD format as well. I have a number of CD-R music collections.

Uh, no. There is a good reason why MP3 is called a "lossy" compression scheme.

rw

 

But lets be real here.. the real reason people want mp3s is so they don't have to pay for the music. Thats the plain a simple truth. One DVD with hundreds of songs that you picked. How convenient is that?

It has nothing to do with the sound quality.

 

I disagree somewhate with the original post. If you encode the MP3 (or WMA for that matter) in a VBR format the quality can be excellent. You can also do a theoretically mathematically lossless compression that will yield outstanding results.

I think though the original poster of this thread (and many others) missed a very important point. Lets talk about dynamic range. Hopefully some of you know what that is.

Digital music can have a very wide dynamic range (the range in volume from the quietest to the loudest points). This it almost TOTALLY wasted in a car. If you turn up the volume loud enough to hear the quietest sounds the loudest will be way too loud. This is because of the ambient road noise. This wonderful dynamic range is very useful in a quiet environment but on the road it can be a liability if you turn up the volume too loud.

I have MP3/WMA players in every car I have. I find them much more useful than a CD changer which I also have in every car except one. If I overburn a CD I can fit almost 200 songs on 1 CD with very good sound quality.

I also like (as others have pointed out) that I can mix all the songs that I WANT and not just the filler on some of the albums. This makes my drive more enjoyable and I do use XM radio from time to time as well.

As some moronic comment someone made that the reason people use MP3s is because they don't want to pay for them, BS! I have ripped my entire CD collection of over 2000 CDs to MP3 format so I can have them the way I want them! I also like to listen to a lot of foreign music and it's difficult to buy some of the CDs. So...I send money to my friends in other countries to buy my CDs there and they rip them for me and send them via the Internet. Not to mention some of the stupid licensing issues where I can only buy certain albums in certain countries.

While I applaud the evolution of car audio and the new DVD system in the TL, I still want to augment it with an orb, MP3 or WMA player. I hate the model of the "album" where we are often stuck buying garbage on the CD that just constitutes as filler to jack up the price of the album. I'd rather pay for just the songs that I want even if that drives up the per song price but my net cost would drop.

I also like that with the digital players I can easily set up playlists for MY MOOD or quickly search for a song by artist, genre or even year. You can't believe what some of you are missing. I will not argue that the sound quality is perfect but NO RECORDING in our lifetime ever will be. So where do you stop? Why not rent Fleetwood Mac to ride in the back of your van and play live for you? Life is full of compromises but the MP3/WMA/ORB files offer very few of them for me. Maybe if I never drove my car I could enjoy the minimal difference...

To each their own and hopefully we can all choose what is best for us and Acura will see fit to at least add a way to add an external player instead of via the RF modulator route.

One last thing regarding the DVD that can hold hundreds of songs in a normal CD format (compromises there too), great idea but how many people have DVD burners setting in their PCs. I have one and it still takes a long time to burn a DVD compared to the 3 minutes I can do a CDR.

 

rw,

rip a CD track to WAV, MP3 it using LAME 3.92 at 320kpbs stereo (4:1 compression), convert it back to WAV, burn it to CD and then compare the tracks on your TL player.

I defy you to tell the difference in the car.

You probably could hear it on a high-end home system, but out of the car system you'd have to have a phenomenonally trained ear.

Now, if you MP3'd it at 160kbps or 128kbps the difference is definitely audible, and the quality IMHO unacceptable. But that's far more extreme compression than what I use.

Mike

 

The above posts have been very interesting. As a mixer and audio design engineer for 30 years, let me state that:

MP3s do NOT sound as good as a CDs or DVD-As. They simply cannot.

However, they CAN sound better than broadcast, cassettes or XM if done properly. The convenience of having thousands of your CD tracks on your hard drive that you can mix and match at will is very attractive! If you use the lowest compression ratios, the sound can be quite acceptable, especially for non-critical listening.

The REAL reasons that the player won't play MP3s is most lilely that:
1. Acura didn't wan't to add the cost of an MP3 decoder IC, and even more likely -
2. That Elliott Scheiner, the "consultant" for the audio system would not allow this, as a purist.

According to industry buzz, he is also the reason that we don't have a simple matrix decoder in the system so that we can play our CDs in surround sound.

A Dolby ProLogic IC or a TrueSurround chip would have allowed us to use the surround system with most of our existing CDs! While they were not encoded for surround, there is ambient information on nearly every record and CD that can be brought out with a decoder circuit. Too Bad - We've got everything needed but the decoder chip!

 

Has anyone figured out a way to hook up a Betamax to the Nav? J/K I don't see why Acura doesn't offer an MP3 player or the rear seat entertainment system for the TL as they do for the TSX

http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/ws/e...item=2437003292

 

Eliot Schiener is a PURIST.. so we can not listen to MP3s?

I think whoever says MP3s do NOT sound nearly as good as CDs are right... or XM.. or ESPECIALLY FM!

HOWEVER... is it up to ACURA to make the determination that "our buyers sould not listen to MP3s.. they may want to, but we won't subject them to bad sounding audio"

That is basically what some people here are saying...

It really shouldn't come down to QUALITY... there are plenty of ways with CD and DVDA to get quality... but it should come down to if it is something the BUYERS want... and I would assume, based on the amount of after market mp3 playing decks (with song/artist tags.. why do we not have this.. you can have it on CD as well), that people DO want this.

Mike

 

XM radio is somewhat over rated in quality. The "cd quality" channels are about the same as an MP3, and a lot of the channels are worse quality than that.

 

I have NEVER seen XM advertised as "CD Quality"

I have ONLY seen XM advertised as "Near CD Quality".. and on the music channels.. all the same.. the talk and news channels.. less than near CD quality because it isn't needed.. talk is talk.


And I am sure they do not use MP3s.. it is XM not napster... they wouldn't use that sort of thing.. or every song would sound bad or good depending on the file.

If you compare XM to regular FM... you really CAN'T! Every FM station sounds different... some sound real bad others just BAD. none sounds as crisp and clear as XM.

Of course CD and DVDA sound better!

 

Listen to all of you IDIOTS out there!

"MP3 doesn't sound good...blah, blah, blah!

Shut the hell up! All of you!

You damn nerds, do you really think there is so much of a difference in sound quality? It's you freaks out there that take it to the extreme. You swear you are experts and have a trained ear or something but give me a DAMN break...you really wouldn't be satisfied unless (like someone mentioned earlier) a live band was playing in the car and even then SOME OF YOU FREAKIN' NERDS WOULD HAVE SOMETHING TO COMPLAIN ABOUT.

MP3's sound good...good enough ok! They are extremely convenient and I wish the new TL had it. Maybe, you could buy one of those portable CD players and plug the adapter into the cassette player to play your MP3 CD's! Huh? Oh, wait, no, I'm sure I'll hear from the NERDS about how it's not compatible b/c the gigabytes from the encoding of the 1.1 Jig-ahh-watts doesn't support such an episode! Marty! Beam Me Up!

"WORST THREAD EVVVERRR!"

ps I REFUSE to use those DAMN little smiley faces too! How gay are those!

 

I responded to the inaccurate absolute statement made. And yes, the difference in my high end music system is significant.

rw

 

Acura should remove the obsolete cassette player. It's a waste of space. An MP3 player makes more sense. Who's still listening to stone-age cassette tapes nowadays?

 

How many of you actually make cds with mp3s? If you do the quality doesnt get any better when you convert. Might as well have an mp3 player in the car so you can fit more per cd. You have to be really anal to tell the difference.

 

Go to your local library and see how many audio books you can find on a medium other than cassette...

 

I've got a Nomad3. It's like an Ipod except with a 40 gig hard drive in it.

I've got my entire audio collection on it. That means ALL of my CDs (about 300), Cassettes, Vinyl, MP3s and anything recorded off the airwaves. In fact, I even ripped a few movies into MP3s that are fun for the long road trip.

It all fits in my Nomad with 10 gigs to spare which serves as a portable hard drive.

Would I rather haul around 300 CDs or my Nomad? Hmmm.

 

This all could be solved quite easily. Just have an external stereo jack so you can plug in whatever source or input you want!!! How hard would that have been???? Then I could plug in my DVD Video player as well as my Archos HD MP3 player, etc.

As for audiobooks...you can now get them in an MP3 format AND download them from the web. Of do what I did, rip them to an MP3 format so I can play them on my Pocket PC!

 

wavshrdr makes the best suggestion of all. The Honda Element has had this since day 1, I'm puzzled as to why Honda hasn't spread across more of their models. I can't expect that it would cost very much and I'm willing to bet that it would appeal to the same folks who find standard Bluetooth appealing.

This is one of those silly little irrational things that ends up motivating people to buy a new car.

I know that you can use a tape deck adapter since the TL has a standard tape deck but that ugly and kludgy. And the radio-based transmitters are all either mediocre or bad. There is an incredibly elegant and inexpensive solution out there in the form of car manufacturers adding line in jacks. Why aren't they doing it?

 

The system in this car is just awesome. You can't have everything.
One thing I'd like to see on ALL cars is a simple audio input. This way you can play your mp3 portable, or whatever. Keep in mind, you can use one of those cassette adapters to play your mp3's.

 

Many of you make good points. It is true that if a wav file is compressed with a higher bit rate you may be able to maintain most of the sound quality but at the same time it would increase the size of the track.

At the same time, would it be possible to add an MP3 decoder with a system that can already read cdr/cdrw/dvd-a. I think it would be as there are DVD players out there that can do just that and are SACD cap.

I notice the difference between an MP3 track and Wav but the difference is more clear at home.

Acura does offer an MP3 acc for the TSX, does anyone think it would be compatiable with the TL.

 

Hey nickademus...

you just stole my idea about 10 threads ago. Pay attention!

 

You aren't being FORCED to read it!

 

I believe many ppl don't have time to read the details from p1 to p10... they just replied what they've seen in the final page... It's truly not their fault...