Transcoded audio & Bluetooth output

[pssturges]

Hi,

Most of my music collection is at least lossless if not hires. Listening in my car, I usually like to connect my iPhone directly to my sound system using a lightning cable in order to maximise sound quality. I’m not necessarily trying to achieve lossless quality in the car, in fact I have Plexamp set to transcode to save mobile bandwidth when not on wifi.

I now have a Tesla Model 3 on order and it’ll be arriving in the next few weeks. It seems that Bluetooth connection of the phone is the only option as the USB ports don’t support phone connection let alone CarPlay. The only supported codecs being SBC & AAC. Whilst I’m comfortable enough with high quality conversion to a lossy format, I’m far less comfortable with multiple compounded lossy conversion in the audio chain.

Firstly, are my concerns reasonable?

I could just direct stream to the phone(untranscoded), but I’d rather not take the bandwidth hit especially if I’m not going to be hearing lossless anyway.

Can anyone suggest an alternative way of going about this?

Would it not make sense to have options to transcode to AAC instead for this kind of scenario?

Thanks

[elan]

the Tesla sound quality is great. I usually try to pre-cache for a little bit in the garage or at my desk before i leave so that i don’t use cellular and i get the lossless files. you can turn up precache settings quite high. but honestly, you shouldn’t be able to tell the difference between that and opus.

[pssturges]

I think I read somewhere that you drive a Tesla? Really looking forward to mine arriving.

Precaching is ok, but I feel its a bit clunky. Using downloaded music also an option but a bit limited also. Seems streaming to a Bluetooth device would be quite common, whether it be to car audio, a speaker or headphones. Double lossy transcoding for a dedicated music app seems a little less than optimal. Wouldn’t be better to try and match the output codec?

[elan]

Matching the output codec doesn’t do anything, we’re outputting PCM (as well as transforming the audio stream with loudness leveling, sweet fades, EQ, etc.)