[Volvolic]

Just thinking out loud here, but has anyone tried plugging in those portable CD readers/writers into the USB port and checking if the CD plays? That might be a cheap solution if it works. I have a portable CD player for my workstation but sadly don't have any CD to check it with.

 

[nbvolks]

My s90 has usb and 3.5 jack in center console.

Just checked our 2019 V90cc Ocean Race. It has the two USB ports and no 3.5mm jack.

 

[gak]

Just thinking out loud here, but has anyone tried plugging in those portable CD readers/writers into the USB port and checking if the CD plays? That might be a cheap solution if it works. I have a portable CD player for my workstation but sadly don't have any CD to check it with.

I tried using a portable CD player with a 3.5mm to USB C cable, plus a USB C to USB 2 converter. The B&W system recognized it, but said "unsupported audio format" on the center display.

 

[hackR]

@nbvolks --> as one of the 83 OR owners in the USA, did you see if the connector is there in your OR?...R (one of the 83...band of Volvo brothers!)

 

[mattlach]

That's what options are for! If you don't need one, don't order it. You claim CDs are a "dead format," but stored music or music played via Bluetooth sounds like absolute crap because I have both. NOTHING beats the quality of a CD in the Bowers & Wilkins system, and if you're paying that kind of money, you should be able to decide through what medium you listen. And the sales people we know have all told us MANY of their customers are disgusted when they find out their 50K car doesn't have one.

Normally I would agree with you, having options so everyone gets what they want, and not forcing things on others who done is a great thing.

The problem - however - is that having lots of options costs Volvo lots of money. It's all about the number of different part numbers they have to carry, how much the inventory costs, validating all of those different parts and all of their permutations and combinations, etc. etc.

In the end, it is in every manufacturers best interest to minimize the number of parts in their supply chain. The costs associated with these things are surprisingly high. How much more would we be willing to pay for these cars, just so that everyone gets their own little desired option?

Now, if - as mentioned above - these things are available in Europe, but not here, that's a questionable choice on their part, but if they decided to just not offer the option at all, I fully understand it. it makes sense. If much less than a third of your customers would opt for the option, it just does not make financial sense to offer it.

Now,

 

[porschie356]

has anyone tried plugging in those portable CD readers/writers into the USB port and checking if the CD plays?

I tried exactly that. Doesn't work.

 

[porschie356]

It occurs to me that there are such things as 3.5mm female jack to USB plug adapter cables. I'm gonna try one of those and see if it will hook a CD player to a V90's USB receptacle.

 

[mattlach]

It occurs to me that there are such things as 3.5mm female jack to USB plug adapter cables. I'm gonna try one of those and see if it will hook a CD player to a V90's USB receptacle.

That might do the trick, but you'd probably have a higher success rate with a 3.5mm bluetooth transmitter, since we know the car already supports bluetooth.

This one looks pretty snazzy:

View attachment 55409

Of course, you'd have to put up with the inherent bluetooth quality loss. Most people don't notice it though, and since the application is audiobooks it probably doesn't matter.

 

[mattlach]

If you posters above are happy with Bluetooth or MP3 audio quality then, er, may the gods shower blessings upon you. Neither is as good as CD quality audio. Sure, there are work-arounds such as ripping .aflac files to a thumb drive, but this too is an indicator of contempt for customers. What possible reason could there be to delete the previously supplied Aux jack, or not allow customers to add the optional CD player available on some other S90, V90 and V90CC models?

I did not pop for a B&W system in order to settle for MP3 audio quality.

Bluetooth I'd agree, but mp3 quality complaints are an urban legend at this point.

In the early days of mp3, when CPU's were slower and it took a lot of time to encode mp3 files, there were many really ****ty mp3 encoders which took shortcuts to compress the files faster, and produce absolutely terrible audio quality. the Xing MP3 encoder was probably the most notorious of these.

In the last 15 years though this just hasn't been the case, unless someone who has no idea what they are doing has done the encode.

A good 10-15 years ago, some forum members on Hydrogenaudio.org (a popular Audiophile forum at the time) did a thorough double blinded study. They coded an A/B tester application which people on the forum could download and test on their own high end audiophile equipment.

It played a few snippets of different styles of music, side by side. One was the direct WAV file (uncompressed identical to CD) rip. The other was a Lame (high end mp3 encoder) encoded mp3 file using the "--alt-preset standard" setting*.

*(The command line settings for Lame presets have changed since then, but --alt-preset standard, was essentially a middle of the road stereo VBR encode producing VBR mp3 files that tended to average ~160 bitrate files)


I can't remember the details, but I think there was a rock, jazz, vocal and classical sample. Something like that.

Volunteers (all of which used their own "audiophile grade" equipment could switch back and forth listening to the two samples of each music clip as many times as they wanted, before selecting the one they thought was the mp3 sample. Their selection was recorded, and submitted to the database.

The result?

Even audiophiles on high end equipment only got it right 50% of the time. Or in other words, no better than chance, picking one of the samples randomly.

So, while - yes - there have been a lot of terrible compressed files over the years, some of them sounding absolutely awful, mp3 can also sound very good indistinguishable from the source, if you use the right settings when encoding, and these settings don't even have to be the highest ones, a good set of medium bitrate VBR settings can accomplish this goal.

This is why, in conclusion, it is utterly pointless waste for even a high end audiophile to subscribe to TIDAL, or cling to their CD's or lossless FLAC encodes even bother with HD CD's, DVD audio or DSD formats. Neither God nor man can tell the difference, and it has been scientifically proven. Any perceived difference is 100% placebo effect.

Personally, in my home, I listen to my music using a high end Schiit Multibit DAC fed into a Parasound Halo class amplifier, using RBH;s top end tower speakers and a set of 1.5KW rms active SVS tube subs, most of which I acknowledge are total overkill, and I am totally happy with Spotify's "very high" quality encodes (320kbit, OGG eoncodes) Even the "very high" setting is probably overkill.

People just need to stop suffering from Audio Nervosa, and realize that most things we experience in life are plagued by bias and the placebo effect.

 

[porschie356]

I currently have an iPod mini filled with music plugged into the USP port in the center console. Am I going to increase sound quality by using a 3.5mm Bluetooth transmitter plus an inexpensive (under $100) portable CD player? Probably hardly matters, since I'm deaf in one ear from too many years of flying loud airplanes.

Sorry for such a basic question, but I'm from the vinyl-records era, back when a Pickering cartridge was a big deal. (And Pickering was a pal; we both owned Aston DB-4s.)

 

[mattlach]

I currently have an iPod mini filled with music plugged into the USP port in the center console. Am I going to increase sound quality by using a 3.5mm Bluetooth transmitter plus an inexpensive (under $100) portable CD player? Probably hardly matters, since I'm deaf in one ear from too many years of flying loud airplanes.

Sorry for such a basic question, but I'm from the vinyl-records era, back when a Pickering cartridge was a big deal. (And Pickering was a pal; we both owned Aston DB-4s.)

It depends?

The advantage of the CD player is that the audio is not compressed. You can accomplish the same effect by just using uncompressed audio (raw wavs) lossslessly compressed audio (Flac files) or just properly compressed high quality mp3's. I have no way of knowing the quality of the content on your ipod. There is nothing inherently wrong with an ipod, but the files on it could be compressed poorly and thus produce poor quality audio. (If you were to burn the same files to a CD, you would carry forward that quality loss, so this would not be an improvement. You would need to reacquire the files in higher quality)

Now, bluetooth will almost certainly be a downgrade. Bluetooth operates in a transmitter -> receiver setup. The transmitter compresses the audio stream and transfers it wirelessly to the receiver, which decompresses it. This is done in real time, on very limited hardware, resulting in the compression causing significant quality loss. Almost anything is better than listening via bluetooth.

With your current iPod, what I presume is happening is that it is transferring the audio digitally via the USB connection, and using the Analog to Digital converter in the car. I have no idea what AD converter Volvo used, but it is probably newer/better than an old one in a little portable device, so chances are you are getting better AD conversion this way as well.

I would keep the ipod. If the quality is unsatisfactory, try putting higher quality files on the iPod.

OR

I understand there is a way to transfer the files directly to the car, or maybe playing them directly from a USB stick. (I am not sure how this works yet). You could try doing that, and eliminate the iPod out of the equation all together?