Our Lucid Air’s have Dolby Atmos speaker technology on board. I use Apple music through Bluetooth. In order for this to be utilized you need to adjust your sound quality in your iPhone. Go to settings>music>sound quality and you’ll see where to ”turn on” Dolby Atmos. Some you surely are way ahead of me but this music is dazzling with this adjustment. Enjoy
Dolby Atmos
- Thread starter Johnboy
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Perhaps it does, I’m not sure but I needed to make a change in settings to access the full potential of the Lucid sound system. I was underwhelmed at first hearing. Then I made the adjustment and WOW! The offer from Tidal caused me to even look in to it. I was unaware of Dolby Atmos
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So I have over 1400 Dolby Atmos songs saved on an Apple Music Playlist. I have the setting on my iPhone turned on and I agree it does sound great via Bluetooth on the Air's sound system. However, some "expert" audiophiles here on the forum have assured me that you can't get true Dolby Atmos sound via Bluetooth so for the time being I am listening to Dolby Atmos recordings on Tidal, albeit Tidal has a much reduced library of Dolby Atmos recordings compared to Apple Music. This is the primary reason I am so anxious to get Apple CarPlay so we can "stream" Apple Music.
Can YOU hear the difference between the Tidal Dolby tracks and your Bluetooth streamed Dolby tracks?
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Yes I think I can on some tracks.
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Man I would kill to just have Bluetooth work reliably cuz I’d rather use my phone to stream Tidal because I can definitely hear quality difference between Bluetooth Tidal using Master bit depth versus Tidal on the Lucid head unit. Bluetooth seems to work better for Apple Music as I can just choose my phone via Bluetooth.
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Nope
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I’m told this will eventually change. No idea when, of course.
MidwestLucidDude
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This is interesting. I did not realize you could play TIDAL MQA files through the iPhone. While I don't own a Lucid Air, yet. I do have a Mazda CX-5 and normally I play TIDAL MQA files through an Onkyo DP-X1A using bluetooth. In the past I compared listening to my music using my iPhone then the same track using the Onkyo and the Onkyo was way better, but I'll now have to try the iPone with the MQA files and see how that compares. I'll report back when I have tested this.
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Oh I just meant via CarPlay, plug my phone in and it streams master quality tidal tracks.
MidwestLucidDude
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Oh, now I understand what you are saying. I'm not a huge expert on Master Quality Authentication (MQA) but from what I know there are a few ways it gets implemented. One is hardware which is the best, the other is a software implementation which I've heard is not the ideal. Most MQA files are FLAC files with an MQA layer that is unfolded to give you the sound that is referred to "As the artist intended you to hear their music." The point of MQA is to give you higher quality in a small file size, and there supposedly some copy protection of the file too. You can Google the topic, which you'll find there are big fans and big detractors of the whole MQA universe. A lot of it has to do with the extra licensing fees that MQA imposes on everyone who wants to use it.
Which brings me back to MQA on the iPhone, I highly doubt the iPhone can make MQA happen even at the software level. So I'm not sure what master files you end up listening to through CarPlay. I don't think the iPhone can even handle FLAC or DSD files and most master files, as I understand what a master is, should be a FLAC file or DSD. I think TIDAL is somehow converting the files before sending them over to the phone but that is just a guess.
The point is for all you folks that can afford a Lucid Air and are passionate about music are probably better served by using a Digital Audio Player (DAP). They are purpose built to play music with better digital to audio converter chips (some will employ two of these chips), and all the electronics are of higher quality and have better isolation than what you'll get in a smart phone. I'll report back on a few more test using my Onkyo DAP and my iPhone, but as I said, the last time I tested it there was a noticeable improvement in sound quality using the Onkyo over the iPhone.
For those interested in this subject, the following article from 2016 is still relevant today. https://www.techradar.com/news/audi...er-in-2016-and-some-reasons-you-don-t-1327123
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Yeah I have no idea how it pulls it off, but can 5G streaming not pull off the bandwidth needed for FLAC or Tidal MQA format? On my Mercedes I did an A/B comparison between “high” quality and “master” quality tracks over streaming, not downloaded, and the difference was noticeable that way. Meanwhile the Tidal app in the Lucid won’t allow above “high” quality, so I was hoping I could stream from my phone connected via USB to get better quality, but it can’t be done in the Lucid, and while I don’t know the technicals of what Bluetooth can handle for a FLAC/MQA file bandwidth, it doesn’t matter since Bluetooth audio keeps crapping out on my car. So all I can do is hope for CarPlay to get what audio I can via 5G streaming down the USB pipe into the Lucid’s sound system, since you can’t interface a standalone digital audio player in the Lucid I guess? @hydbob figured out the trick to tell Alexa to play Tidal tracks and it really does seem to play with a higher quality than if you just choose the track in the Lucid app manually, and I don’t understand why, but that’s also cumbersome and telling it to play your playlists doesn’t work most of the time. That’s a lot of words I typed to basically state that Lucid really needs to figure out how to make using their fantastic audio system easy instead of the limited half functioning version it is right now.
Disco Marathon
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Hold on a sec - streaming a song to Lucid Air over Bluetooth, from Amazon Music app on an iPhone, where Amazon Music marks the song as "Atmos," will not truly be Atmos-quality playback? Only way to get true Atmos-quality playback is to use a native music app in the Lucid Air's infotainment system? What are the native apps, besides Tidal?
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I’m not sure, I haven’t tried Amazon Music on the Lucid, I don’t have a subscription. On the Tidal app you can find Atmos songs and it says it’s playing it in Atmos. Most music recordings that say “Atmos” are not natively mixed in Atmos though, like with height channels, etc, so it matters less than people think given most artist/engineers never recorded or mixed it that way. Maybe Bluetooth can handle the bandwidth, I don’t know. All I know is I’ve tried many times to play audio from my phone via Bluetooth and it’s unreliable, can’t ever tell when it’s going to work or just get hung up trying to load a song for eternity.
Does anyone know if you can use a DAP with the Lucid? Do they have bluetooth that will connect directly and will the car handle it and make beautiful music? MidwestLucidDude, can you educate me (and others) about this? I am hoping you have tried it/are trying it....
