Hey fellas,

I've been going through the process of cleaning up my MP3 collection (about 7k songs), and used various apps to get this done such as TuneUp to tag my songs and various duplicate finders to get rid of duplicates. Overall, I'm fairly happy with the results.

Since I started building my collection in the late 90s, I had a lot of old songs which were 128 kbs in quality and wanted to find ways to improve the sound quality. Doing some research, I found that iTunes match was one way to do so (for 25 bucks a year) since after matching your songs, you can download 256 kbs AAC versions if iTunes matched your song. iTunes did a great job at matching and nearly matched 80% of my library.

Rather than keeping my old 192, 256 and 320 kbs mp3s, I thought I would just switch anything that was matched to 256 Kbs AACs.

Now, onto my findings. My 2013 TL ELS sound system sounded awesome with my old mp3 collection. I expected an equivalent quality to my 256 kbs songs, an improvement over my 128 and 192, and slight degradation compared to my 320.

When listening to my songs now (same song to get a comparison), I notice the following:

- Overall volume is very low for my AAC songs. For instance, a song that used to be relatively loud at volume level 10 now needs to be turned up to mid-20s to get an equivalent level. An equivalent to level 15 needs to be turned up into the 30s now at which point the ELS system starts to distort. The old level 20 was very loud without distorting and I can't even get to that level with my new AAC songs.
- Bass and treble are noticeably lower than my old mp3s.

So, my question to those who have noticed this as well is were you able to find any settings either in iTunes or on your iPhone to fix this?

I should mention that my old mp3 collection was on an iPhone 4S and my new collection is on an iPhone 6, but I don't think that would make a difference. I tried using the equalizer on the iPhone 6 but it doesn't do a good job of correcting this (note that my old iPhone 4S had the equalizer off).

Thanks!

 

First, probably the wrong forum.

Second, AAC will have better quality at any bitrate than MP3.

And that's all I'm going to add here. Lol

 

 

haha, it's not a bad system for something that's OEM and wasn't an option that cost over $1k like other manufacturers charge. I actually like it better than the Mark Levinson I had in my Lexus IS and the Harmon Kardon in the 335.

 

I suspect if you are using iTunes songs and you are not using an ipod to play your songs, you are missing out on an iTunes feature called Sound Check. This tells the player to increase the volume to a normalized level.

The non-proprietary version of this is the metadata tag REPLAYGAIN. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReplayGain

 

I use my iPhone to play music via the USB input in the car. I turned off Sound Check on my iPhone 6 and it fixed my problem. Thanks for that.

I'm not sure why having Sound Check On on my iPhone 4S didn't cause any issues, but anyway, out with the old and in with the new!

Thanks again.