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If I play ALAC on my iPhone (6S+) through a wired CarPlay interface, is the car getting the full lossless stream? Even at say, 24-bit, 96kHz ?
My car can handle ALAC/FLAC natively so my motive for asking is whether I can just use CarPlay or use SD cards for better quality.
I know if I stream music via Bluetooth it's compressed down to meet A2DP which is fairly poor.
OK, so doing some digging, and contacting the developer of VOX, it seems that audio streams via CarPlay are treated "more or less like audio via the Lightning connector."
This would therefore be up to 24bit, 96khz 2-channel, unmolested, but what the receiving end does with it is out of the phone and the developer's hands.
Now I know my car can handle that, but I'll have to contact my car's tech people for clarification.
One thing for sure, it won't be lower-grade, compressed streams as you'd get with AD2P / Bluetooth.
OK, so doing some digging, and contacting the developer of VOX, it seems that audio streams via CarPlay are treated "more or less like audio via the Lightning connector."
This would therefore be up to 24bit, 96khz 2-channel, unmolested, but what the receiving end does with it is out of the phone and the developer's hands.
Now I know my car can handle that, but I'll have to contact my car's tech people for clarification.
One thing for sure, it won't be lower-grade, compressed streams as you'd get with AD2P / Bluetooth.
No, actually it is not and it is based on past usage and testing but I really don't have the time to go into with you and somehow prove myself.
If VOX is supported via CarPlay then you can use it to serve your purpose. If it is not supported you can go here: https://www.apple.com/feedback/iphone.html and ask that it be included. It is a pretty limited app support set for CarPlay so are you sure it is supported?
Using any other Apple app the best you are getting is Apple Lossless which is not going to be as high a quality. I find for my car it is fine, if I had a Mark Levinson system I would probably be doing the same thing as you. You can also use AIFF with iTunes and go a bit higher. Somewhere in Apple's documentation they list what formats the iPhone supports.
Would you care to explain why?
Details of the transport and encoding protocols used are fairly hard to come by (except for A2DP), so if you have some actual concrete information that pertains to this, I'd love to know.
No, actually I wouldn't and not details are not that hard to come by. But I play all of my items that are HD on my Macs, not on my iDevices since VLC is no longer available. Even iTunes doesn't do ALAC and FLAC without a plugin. So what are you using on your iPhone to play your ALAC files and if you are using an app is that app supported by CarPlay?
OK, so just your opinion then rather than an answer. That's ok, I've get a lot of those.
In answer to your question though, an app I use is VOX, specifically designed for lossless/HD audio on iOS.
It prefers FLAC (and the same original question goes for that), but does do Apple Lossless and does support CarPlay.
Also, the iCloud Drive app (standard Apple app) plays Apple Lossless too, although that doesn't do CarPlay of course.
Personally, I think you are right, and that I'm not getting a high bitrate/high frequence/multi-channel stream via CarPlay, but I'd quite like to know for sure.
You won't be able to use any Apple music apps to reproduce ALAC and get the full stream, you would be better served using SD cards directly with your system.
ALAC -> CarPlay - still lossless, HD?
