Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler A2DP quality?

Yeah, it's the FM part. With A2DP it is possible to send an untouched MP3/AAC bitsteam between two devices. That's provided the transmitter has access to the original file data, and the receiver supports that codec. In most cases the audio is decoded into PCM, and then re-encoded into SBC, which all A2DP devices must support, so quality suffers. SBC is roughly based upon MPEG Audio-Layer II, or MP2, which I doubt many of you have ever seen. It's best suited to voice (just not male, German voices, as found my the Fraunhofer Institute).

I wonder if there's any support for ALAC bitstreams. Probably not.

The protocol is extensible, so as long as the transmitter and receiver agreed on the codec it would be possible. I just don't think anyone's building devices to do it.

Blast. So much for re-ripping every single CD in my collection. Not that I've moved the ALAC versions over to storage that actually connects to my iP[ad|od|hone].

I just checked Pioneer's BT module for their receivers. Since they support MP3 and AAC decoding in the receiver I thought they might support them natively. Nope, SBC only.

I fear that's going to almost always be the case. So you're ALACs will get decompressed into PCM and then encoded into SBC. Not as bad as turning already lossy compressed files like MP3 or AAC into a different lossy format, but as I said SBC isn't a very good codec (just really easy to implement in hardware).

Eh, it wouldn't bother me too much to downconvert the ALACs into 256K AACs or 320K MP3s (just time and storage, who cares about that!), but the trick is finding the dock connector transmitter and receiver pair that would work. From what I know, the iPhone and iPad do not properly support A2DP, and I don't normally use those for playing music in any case.

Wow, I just now read up on Apple's support for A2DP. It's really sorry isn't it? Pioneer's module would allow for the receiver's remote to step through tracks, pause, and even show song titles on screen. But Apple didn't implement AVRCP at all. So you'd get play and stop.

So yeah a dock is your only hope. But it would have to have access to the file information on the player (digital), along with transmitting the raw files (codec support).

You know what you need, now it's a matter of finding if someone makes it.

Basically what I want is what Steve has (ie, the iPod as remote control), but I want to be sure that the audio quality is good enough to warrant using it with the M80s as my primary music source.

I wouldn't worry about A2DP, then. Just a way to have your music collection available to play through your receiver. Be it by DLNA server to the receiver, or another device. Then find an app for the iPod that will allow it to control what's being played.

heh. I mean an old iPod, not an iOS version.