The quality of the sound system in the car is possibly secondary to the amount/quality of sound deadening in the car. Road noise is a nasty thing unless there is a lot of well engineered sound deadening material and acoustic design.

Once that's taken care of, then the audio can be appreciated. When I last owned a car, it was an enormous Lexus. The audio experience was sublime just with the premium factory system. But with the audio off, the cocoon was still so much better than what I've experienced in "regular" cars.

Unless you're in a Rolls Royce or Maybach while driving, I seriously doubt you'll tell the difference between FLAC and MP3. There's just too much external interference to compete with the subtleties that a high end audio signal can offer compared to a more typical system.

Regardless of what car you’re in, you’re not going to be able to reliably tell the difference between a flac file and an mp3 with a reasonable bit rate (256+).

I disagree. I have a stock sound system that I can easily tell the difference between a 320kbps MP3 and a CD flac in a blind test. I don't believe I have any special hearing as pretty much anyone I'm with can tell the difference.

-It does, of course, also depend on which MP3 encoder and settings you use; I did a most interesting (to me, anyway!) series of ABX trials on my own ears a few years ago.

From a 24/96 PCM master I prepared lots of transcodings - 16/44.1, 12/44.1, 8/44.1, 16/22, 12/22, 8/22, 320, 256, 192, 160, 128kbps mp3 with various options for encoding, ditto AAC - etc, etc.

I then used the (brilliant!) ABX plugin for Foobar and an excellent set of headphones, and after a few days I had a fair idea of how good my ears really were. Or, as it turns out, weren't. In most cases, 256kbps mp3 and red book were impossible to tell apart; 320kbps being indistinguishable in all but one case, if memory serves. However, at both 256 and 320kbps I had to listen hard for encoding artifacts rather than just enjoying the music.

Most tracks were eminently listenable at 192kbps mp3, but I could then reliably tell whether I listened to an mp3 or PCM without much effort.

Hard disk cost being what it is, I still ripped all my CDs lossless, though.

128kbps? I shudder at the thought of my 20-year-old-self telling myself and others that it was just about as good as uncompressed audio...

Oh, and you'd be surprised at how little dynamic range is actually utilized; on most tracks, telling 16/44.1 from 8/44.1 was next to impossible.

Yeah I've messed with dynamic range a bit, even got caught by the 24/96 hype for a while. But after running my own blind tests, I couldn't tell any difference with it.

On some songs with some setups I do believe you can still hear a difference but it's unlikely you'll have those songs and/or those setups. The vast majority of the time, unless the encoder for the MP3 is garbage, you won't be able to tell them apart.

https://www.head-fi.org/threads/abx-test-of-320kbps-vs-flac-...

https://blog.codinghorror.com/concluding-the-great-mp3-bitra...

Lower-fidelity playback systems and environments can actually reveal artifacts in lossily compressed audio. The psychoacoustic encoder makes assumptions about what noises mask other noises - if noises it expects to be present are absent (for instance, if your playback system has a poor frequency response), then low-bitrate noises can be unmasked.

I would not be surprised if additional noise, such as road noise, can also subvert masking phenomena in some way, but I don't know of any studies that tested this.

Its not just the speakers, its the loud rumble from the car moving. Maybe some cars have perfect sound insulation but I would say thats not very safe to be driving if you can't hear the outside.

nitpick: apt-x hd is a lossy audio codec and is almost never the source encoding of the music. most people are streaming aac, vorbis, or mp3, which is transcoded on the fly to apt-x hd. this is a lossy-to-lossy transcode which is basically never going to be transparent. apt-x hd is not a "quality signal" unless you happen to have a bunch of flacs on your phone.

I meant apt-x HD as the transmission codec for a Bluetooth connection rather than as a compression format for the audio files themselves.

I understand. what I'm saying is, nine times out of ten, the audio files themselves are already going to be in a lossy format. it's not really practical to have lossless content on your phone or stream it over a mobile connection. the lossy-to-lossy transcode is going to sound bad enough that most people would notice in a double blind test. this isn't some mp3 v0 vs flac audiophile nonsense; lossy-to-lossy transcodes sound noticeably bad.

from your other comment, I see that you are using a pretty good DAC in your car. kudos to you, sir.

>especially if fed a FLAC, Apt-X HD or other quality signal.

How many cars actually support FLAC or Apt-X HD?

All those with an analog or USB input?

No.

It's how I do it. I use a Sony NW-WM1A and plug it into the analog input in the car. Sounds fantastic.

You seem to have basically no idea of what you're talking about.

Really? I seem to not know what sounds good to me? Okay, then.