New iPhone User Audio Questions

Equipment / Electronics / Gear / Accessories Portable DAC/AMPs & Dongles
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After being an Android user since 2009, I had to move to iPhone this week for personal, but very specific reasons. The audio/music side of this transition seems extremely convoluted, and admittedly, whenever it’s been brought up in the review of other audio gear I’m certain I just blacked out :rofl:

  • So clearly I can’t get a high bitrate stream over bluetooth. I have a Fiio BTR7, but it looks like over bluetooth all I can do is AAC at relatively low quality (44K/24B). If I plug into it over USB on Spotify, I get bumped up to 44K/32B, which I believe is where Spotify maxes out on any device. Is there any way around this?

  • In a car, what is the best way to play audio when your source is an iPhone? Am I just stuck with AAC if its Bluetooth? I think my S.O.'s car has Carplay, is that any better? If I really care, is my best bet to plug my phone in to an external device, and plug that into my car’s Aux?

  • I can still use Spotify Connect to play off of my Google Home devices, but if I wanted to cast music from Plex that seems like it’s off the table. Is that correct?

  • My Plex server is down due to some router trouble, but if I stream from that over USB to the Fiio BTR7, will that play losslessly?

  • If I airplay or cast something from my Plex library to gear in my house, will that be downsampled due to the limitations of the iPhone?

  • Are there any common best practices for iPhone users and their audio gear that I haven’t even thought to ask yet? It hasn’t been a week, and I’m still just trying to get all my apps set up.

Thanks for any help and/or insight!

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try a mental hospital

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That was both not funny, and not helpful.

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Spotify isn’t bit perfect. Try Apple Music, Tidal or some other service that can. If you hook the btr7 to the phone via usb, iOS does not resample and sends whatever native bit rate the song is in. So long as the dongle can handle it. If you have an older iPhone with a lightning port, your more limited if your using a dongle relying on power from the phone (no battery). Luckily you don’t have to worry about that with the btr7.

I’m not completely sure about your plex question. Someone with more experience here could answer better.

With iOS you’re limited to AAC, but I’ve found it to sound quite good with my 14 pro. Definitely better than most codecs (sbc, lossy aptX)

I connect my iPhone via usb to my car which has CarPlay. You can get bit perfect that way, so long as the DAC in your car stereo can do lossless. Using an external dongle to aux might sound better depending on the quality of the DAC in your stereo vs external DAC. Might be worth trying both

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i use the fubar app to play bootleg lossless music on my iphone.

also my car has BMW harman kardon “upgraded” audio ( its trash ) and i dont notice a difference between lossless and 192/320 mp3. some songs in mp3 sound better in some cases, cuz with lossless,some files, at higher volumes, there is some distortion. ( enhancers turned on and off ). that could be from bootleg files though, but those same files sound good on my computer