Most reliable mode for music listening.

[stratus]

I did a little 3 way comparison with a track I know extremely well because I was in the studio when it was mixed in its original 24bit/96khz format (Jon Brion’s score for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind).

Here’s what I observed:
- In Tidal, the car’s app sound quality is OK, just fine for non-critical listening.
- As some genius members of this forum discovered, if you say “Hey Alexa play”… and then say what you want it to play, it somehow unlocks a music GOD MODE and the music quality is literally indistinguishable from what was heard in the studio when the song was first recorded. I’m literally in disbelief, as this is the first time I’ve ever heard a car accurately reproduce a film score and got goosebumps. I don’t know how it does it (all films are encoded in Dolby Digital but that’s once the Printmaster is made, whereas this sounded like the pre-printmaster uncompressed audio), but it works, and it turns the audio system in this car to the best car audio I’ve ever heard. What sorcery is this?
-If you try to stream the identical track over Bluetooth, it worked for me but didn’t sound quite as good as whatever the hell this “Hey Alexa play…” golden ears mode is, but it’s better than using the car’s Tidal app.

This is all confusing to me. But if CarPlay doesn’t fix it all then I’m going to use “Hey Alexa play…” for the rest of my life and not complain that it’s an annoying workaround because the results are worth it!

That is truly bizarre!!!

I hope car play fixes it, but not holding my breath.

 

[hydbob]

I did a little 3 way comparison with a track I know extremely well because I was in the studio when it was mixed in its original 24bit/96khz format (Jon Brion’s score for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind).

Here’s what I observed:
- In Tidal, the car’s app sound quality is OK, just fine for non-critical listening.
- As some genius members of this forum discovered, if you say “Hey Alexa play”… and then say what you want it to play, it somehow unlocks a music GOD MODE and the music quality is literally indistinguishable from what was heard in the studio when the song was first recorded. I’m literally in disbelief, as this is the first time I’ve ever heard a car accurately reproduce a film score and got goosebumps. I don’t know how it does it (all films are encoded in Dolby Digital but that’s once the Printmaster is made, whereas this sounded like the pre-printmaster uncompressed audio), but it works, and it turns the audio system in this car to the best car audio I’ve ever heard. What sorcery is this?
-If you try to stream the identical track over Bluetooth, it worked for me but didn’t sound quite as good as whatever the hell this “Hey Alexa play…” golden ears mode is, but it’s better than using the car’s Tidal app.

This is all confusing to me. But if CarPlay doesn’t fix it all then I’m going to use “Hey Alexa play…” for the rest of my life and not complain that it’s an annoying workaround because the results are worth it!

This almost wants me to try Tidal again...almost

 

[TCGT]

I did a little 3 way comparison with a track I know extremely well because I was in the studio when it was mixed in its original 24bit/96khz format (Jon Brion’s score for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind).

Here’s what I observed:
- In Tidal, the car’s app sound quality is OK, just fine for non-critical listening.
- As some genius members of this forum discovered, if you say “Hey Alexa play”… and then say what you want it to play, it somehow unlocks a music GOD MODE and the music quality is literally indistinguishable from what was heard in the studio when the song was first recorded. I’m literally in disbelief, as this is the first time I’ve ever heard a car accurately reproduce a film score and got goosebumps. I don’t know how it does it (all films are encoded in Dolby Digital but that’s once the Printmaster is made, whereas this sounded like the pre-printmaster uncompressed audio), but it works, and it turns the audio system in this car to the best car audio I’ve ever heard. What sorcery is this?
-If you try to stream the identical track over Bluetooth, it worked for me but didn’t sound quite as good as whatever the hell this “Hey Alexa play…” golden ears mode is, but it’s better than using the car’s Tidal app.

This is all confusing to me. But if CarPlay doesn’t fix it all then I’m going to use “Hey Alexa play…” for the rest of my life and not complain that it’s an annoying workaround because the results are worth it!

Reminds me of my college radio days when I worked with a former producer from Elektra records. We had a nice run at our 24 hour jazz radio station in Houston (KUHF Jazz88), and he used to always say the curse of a sound engineer is that they’ll always know what it’s suppose to sound like, and everything outside of that comes up short. Love hearing (no pun) that you’re finding GOD MODE in the Lucid. This is further confirmation I’m making the right choice.

 

[SaratogaLefty]

I did a little 3 way comparison with a track I know extremely well because I was in the studio when it was mixed in its original 24bit/96khz format (Jon Brion’s score for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind).

Here’s what I observed:
- In Tidal, the car’s app sound quality is OK, just fine for non-critical listening.
- As some genius members of this forum discovered, if you say “Hey Alexa play”… and then say what you want it to play, it somehow unlocks a music GOD MODE and the music quality is literally indistinguishable from what was heard in the studio when the song was first recorded. I’m literally in disbelief, as this is the first time I’ve ever heard a car accurately reproduce a film score and got goosebumps. I don’t know how it does it (all films are encoded in Dolby Digital but that’s once the Printmaster is made, whereas this sounded like the pre-printmaster uncompressed audio), but it works, and it turns the audio system in this car to the best car audio I’ve ever heard. What sorcery is this?
-If you try to stream the identical track over Bluetooth, it worked for me but didn’t sound quite as good as whatever the hell this “Hey Alexa play…” golden ears mode is, but it’s better than using the car’s Tidal app.

This is all confusing to me. But if CarPlay doesn’t fix it all then I’m going to use “Hey Alexa play…” for the rest of my life and not complain that it’s an annoying workaround because the results are worth it!

I find the Tidal Dolby Atmos recordings (somewhat limited) do sound really good and I have created a Tidal Playlist of exclusively Dolby Atmos recordings. However, when I try using the Alexa/Tidal approach I can't get it to access my Playlist. I can get it to play a given selection but it isn't the Dolby Atmos version?? Any suggestions how to get the "Hey Alexa" approach to work with my Tidal Playlist? I do have Tidal selected on the Alexa App.

 

[Bunnylebowski]

I find the Tidal Dolby Atmos recordings (somewhat limited) do sound really good and I have created a Tidal Playlist of exclusively Dolby Atmos recordings. However, when I try using the Alexa/Tidal approach I can't get it to access my Playlist. I can get it to play a given selection but it isn't the Dolby Atmos version?? Any suggestions how to get the "Hey Alexa" approach to work with my Tidal Playlist? I do have Tidal selected on the Alexa App.

I can’t get Alexa to play custom Tidal playlists unfortunately. If anyone has any ideas I’m up for it.

 

[SaratogaLefty]

I can’t get Alexa to play custom Tidal playlists unfortunately. If anyone has any ideas I’m up for it.

Okay but have you found a way to get it to play the Dolby Atmos version of a particular recording?

 

[Bunnylebowski]

I didn’t try but I’ll look into it. In the app you can view custom playlists with Dolby Atmos, but you can’t play ones you’ve made with “Hey Alexa” unless there’s a workaround I’m not aware of. I think they have an 80’s Atmos playlist (which is funny because Atmos wasn’t a format until like 2009 or something), but I’ll see tomorrow if I can get Alexa to play it instead of selecting that playlist in the app, and see if there’s a difference.

 

[Sam6062]

Here’s my experience (sorry, this is long but I have a lot of opinions on this topic)

-I don’t have Amazon Music subscription or Apple Music subscription or Spotify subscription so your experience might be different if you use one of those. I have some music from what used to be iTunes in FLAC format downloaded onto my phone. I do have the HiFi Plus Tidal subscription because it pays artists better than Spotify and also sound the best.

-Tidal to my trained ear (I was a post production sound designer in my previous career) sounds better than the competition, I’ve heard most of them. Most pro-audio these days is recorded in 24bit/96khz, and things older than 10 years may have been 16bit/44.1khz. Almost ALL analog recordings from before then have been converted to those formats and maybe “remastered”. Rarely you’ll find Direct Stream Digital (DSD) which sounds like real life right in your face, but only if you have expensive equipment that can handle that bandwidth and speakers with studio quality frequency response (I recommend Meyer HD1s, and a few friends of mine who are still in the sound business swear by Focal SM9s). MP3 compression and some of the others are garbage compared to Tidal formats, even Tidal’s lowest quality option is audibly superior. Apple FLAC format is pretty good, but Tidal MQS sounds “fuller” to my ears than anything else and I don’t know why because FLAC is supposedly “lossless” (it’s what the L stands for). Tidal has about 90% of the music selection Spotify does but lacks podcasts/radio.

-The problem is Lucid’s LTE connection can’t seem to stream at Tidal’s top quality. So what do you do? Well I just finally just today got Bluetooth to work correctly from my phone and play on the Lucid, and when I play the same song on my phone via Tidal master quality streaming, it sounds better than if I used the native Tidal app playing the same song. And some clever users here realized if you use Alexa and say “play this song by this artist on Tidal” then it actually uses a higher bandwidth quality audio. Go figure?

-You cannot play any audio via USB at this time, but maybe once we get CarPlay that will happen.

-So my advice is do the 3 month Tidal subscription and see how you like it. There are ways to listen to music in the Lucid, it’s just clunky and requires some workarounds until we get CarPlay.

@hydbob just told me even kids could play music via iPhone in the Lucid via USB and I see you are saying it is not possible today?

 

[hydbob]

@hydbob just told me even kids could play music via iPhone in the Lucid via USB and I see you are saying it is not possible today?

When did I ever say anything about via USB...

 

[Bunnylebowski]

Okay but have you found a way to get it to play the Dolby Atmos version of a particular recording?

Tried this this morning. This is trickier. If you say “Hey Alexa play…” there’s no guarantee it will default to the Dolby Atmos version of the song, and if you say “Hey Alexa play the Dolby Atmos version of Tom Sawyer” or whatever, it won’t pick the Atmos version. However, I I did select the Atmos version of Guns & Roses Welcome to the Jungle and compared it to “Hey Alexa play…” and with Alexa it did not play the Atmos version BUT the Hey Alexa one sounded better, just had a better sound stage, fuller sound with more detail definitely audible, suggesting to me that Hey Alexa defaults to the highest quality MQA version. However I did the same thing with the Rise of Skywalker soundtrack and that time Alexa chose the Atmos version, and when I played the same version in the app it sounded the same to me. I think the issue is that many Atmos recordings are not in the MQA format which is the best audio quality, but maybe the Rise of Skywalker soundtrack is.

Again this won’t matter to most people, either one sounds good, but for people who are ridiculously neurotic about audio fidelity like me, I’m always going to do the “Hey Alexa play…” approach if I want to actually LISTEN to something. If however I just want music on in the background and not focus on it then using the Tidal app is just fine. I’d be curious if this is a Tidal only problem. Can anyone who has the highest quality streaming Spotify subscription compare? I know Spotify high quality isn’t as good as Tidal’s, but I’m wondering if there’s a difference too between Hey Alexa and the app.

 

[DBordello]

Do you know what service Alexa using? Tidal? Spotify? Amazon?

 

[Bunnylebowski]

You can tell Alexa which one to use. But if I say “Alexa play…” it defaults to Tidal because I didn’t set the car up with other services. But you can say “Alexa on Spotify play…” and it will do that.

 

[Thehack]

Do you know what service Alexa using? Tidal? Spotify? Amazon?

Alexa has "plug ins" to different music streaming services. (I have both Amazon Music, and Spotify registered to my amazon account). So when you ask to play a specific play list on your spotify account, it will play that music (or if you specify "on spotify" it will play through your spotify account). Usually Alexa will play which ever it finds first if both pieces of music are on Amazon Music or Spotify (which will likely be Amazon Music).

I cannot speak to Tidal, but my assumption would be the same.

I do not have my GT yet... however, I have the Spotify app on my Volvo XC90 (it plays "outside" of my phone). I am curious if there is much of a difference in streaming when going through the phone vs the car? The reason I ask is that I seem to get better service through my phone (less cut outs when going through the mountains). I would have thought that the antenna in the vehicle would be stronger for service than my phone, but it appears reversed. Does anyone with the Lucid have any experience with reception (phone vs car)?

 

[Bunnylebowski]

Alexa has "plug ins" to different music streaming services. (I have both Amazon Music, and Spotify registered to my amazon account). So when you ask to play a specific play list on your spotify account, it will play that music (or if you specify "on spotify" it will play through your spotify account). Usually Alexa will play which ever it finds first if both pieces of music are on Amazon Music or Spotify (which will likely be Amazon Music).

I cannot speak to Tidal, but my assumption would be the same.

I do not have my GT yet... however, I have the Spotify app on my Volvo XC90 (it plays "outside" of my phone). I am curious if there is much of a difference in streaming when going through the phone vs the car? The reason I ask is that I seem to get better service through my phone (less cut outs when going through the mountains). I would have thought that the antenna in the vehicle would be stronger for service than my phone, but it appears reversed. Does anyone with the Lucid have any experience with reception (phone vs car)?

Phone is 5G. Car is LTE. That’s why phone is better. I think this is the case with most cars.

 

[stratus]

Tried this this morning. This is trickier. If you say “Hey Alexa play…” there’s no guarantee it will default to the Dolby Atmos version of the song, and if you say “Hey Alexa play the Dolby Atmos version of Tom Sawyer” or whatever, it won’t pick the Atmos version. However, I I did select the Atmos version of Guns & Roses Welcome to the Jungle and compared it to “Hey Alexa play…” and with Alexa it did not play the Atmos version BUT the Hey Alexa one sounded better, just had a better sound stage, fuller sound with more detail definitely audible, suggesting to me that Hey Alexa defaults to the highest quality MQA version. However I did the same thing with the Rise of Skywalker soundtrack and that time Alexa chose the Atmos version, and when I played the same version in the app it sounded the same to me. I think the issue is that many Atmos recordings are not in the MQA format which is the best audio quality, but maybe the Rise of Skywalker soundtrack is.

Again this won’t matter to most people, either one sounds good, but for people who are ridiculously neurotic about audio fidelity like me, I’m always going to do the “Hey Alexa play…” approach if I want to actually LISTEN to something. If however I just want music on in the background and not focus on it then using the Tidal app is just fine. I’d be curious if this is a Tidal only problem. Can anyone who has the highest quality streaming Spotify subscription compare? I know Spotify high quality isn’t as good as Tidal’s, but I’m wondering if there’s a difference too between Hey Alexa and the app.

This is really quite extraordinarily and illustrates just how complicated these software issues are. To someone like me, who is not particularly tech savvy, it’s almost unfathomable.

 

[DJL]

Phone is 5G. Car is LTE. That’s why phone is better. I think this is the case with most cars.

You can te

Tried this this morning. This is trickier. If you say “Hey Alexa play…” there’s no guarantee it will default to the Dolby Atmos version of the song, and if you say “Hey Alexa play the Dolby Atmos version of Tom Sawyer” or whatever, it won’t pick the Atmos version. However, I I did select the Atmos version of Guns & Roses Welcome to the Jungle and compared it to “Hey Alexa play…” and with Alexa it did not play the Atmos version BUT the Hey Alexa one sounded better, just had a better sound stage, fuller sound with more detail definitely audible, suggesting to me that Hey Alexa defaults to the highest quality MQA version. However I did the same thing with the Rise of Skywalker soundtrack and that time Alexa chose the Atmos version, and when I played the same version in the app it sounded the same to me. I think the issue is that many Atmos recordings are not in the MQA format which is the best audio quality, but maybe the Rise of Skywalker soundtrack is.

Again this won’t matter to most people, either one sounds good, but for people who are ridiculously neurotic about audio fidelity like me, I’m always going to do the “Hey Alexa play…” approach if I want to actually LISTEN to something. If however I just want music on in the background and not focus on it then using the Tidal app is just fine. I’d be curious if this is a Tidal only problem. Can anyone who has the highest quality streaming Spotify subscription compare? I know Spotify high quality isn’t as good as Tidal’s, but I’m wondering if there’s a difference too between Hey Alexa and the app.

ll Alexa which one to use. But if I say “Alexa play…” it defaults to Tidal because I didn’t set the car up with other services. But you can say “Alexa on Spotify play…” and it will do that.

Bunnylebowski,
I can't find the comment you posted where you said in a former life you were in the music industry and thus, had experience and skills in sound systems, recordings, etc. With that understanding, I am curious what you think of the Lucid sound system. I get the impression reading your comments that you believe it is pretty good. If sound, could you expend on that. Thanks.

 

[hydbob]

Bunnylebowski,
I can't find the comment you posted where you said in a former life you were in the music industry and thus, had experience and skills in sound systems, recordings, etc. With that understanding, I am curious what you think of the Lucid sound system. I get the impression reading your comments that you believe it is pretty good. If sound, could you expend on that. Thanks.

Lol, last post on page 1,

Post in thread 'Most reliable mode for music listening.' https://lucidowners.com/threads/most-reliable-mode-for-music-listening.1370/post-31910

 

[DJL]

Lol, last post on page 1,

Post in thread 'Most reliable mode for music listening.' https://lucidowners.com/threads/most-reliable-mode-for-music-listening.1370/post-31910

Hey, that great and thanks.

 

[Adnillien]

I took a long drive yesterday in areas with intermittent cellular reception. It seems that Tidal can handle 1-2 minutes without connectivity but is frustratingly awful beyond that. It would rarely restart playing when regaining cellular reception and if it did it would either restart at the beginning a my playlist or start playing my daily discoveries. It would often show no active media even when it was playing. Other times no active media meant no reception and no ability to play. Unless you want to hear the same song over and over, Tidal is extremely poor in areas with intermittent cellular reception. If it could buffer 30 minutes of the music stream, it would probably work great. Even in very remote parts of AZ, it is rare to be out of cellular range for more than 20 to 30 minutes.

 

[histal]

All the more reason to have the USB connectivity work with Android Auto/ Apple CarPlay ASAP.