[SouthMark45]

Evening All

New to the forum and was looking for some advise reference sound quality and how to achieve the best sound quality using a bluetooth Setup

my current setup is:-

IPhone X (with Tidal/Spotify)
Dali IO-6

im not sure whether I need a DAC in addition to the above to enable better Bluetooth codecs as I know Apple devices doesn’t support the best codecs, but I’m a bit new to the Bluetooth game but would still like to achieve the best possible sound quality over Bluetooth

any help or advise would be really appreciated

Thanks

Mark

 

[Raketen]

A DAC won't help with bluetooth. Listening over bluetooth means the headphones are using their own internal DAC.

Your headphones support AAC which is the best you can get using iOS AFAIK. AAC is generally considered a quality codec (if not quite to AptxHD and LDAC level)

Listen with ANC off. YMMV but try listening to lossless (CD Quality) music (flac/alac files or Tidal 'Hi-FI' etc...) - bluetooth has to recompress audio in transmission which can excaberate issues from lossy compression (mp3, Tidal 'High'...).

Otherwise take advantage of your headphones' wired input options when you need maximum quality.

 

[SouthMark45]

A DAC won't help with bluetooth. Listening over bluetooth means the headphones are using their own internal DAC.

Your headphones support AAC which is the best you can get using iOS AFAIK. AAC is generally considered a quality codec (if not quite to AptxHD and LDAC level)

Listen with ANC off. YMMV but try listening to lossless (CD Quality) music (flac/alac files or Tidal 'Hi-FI' etc...) - bluetooth has to recompress audio in transmission which can excaberate issues from lossy compression (mp3, Tidal 'High'...).

Otherwise take advantage of your headphones' wired input options when you need maximum quality.

Thanks Raketen so if I read correctly so long as the format being streamed ie Flac from an IPhone to my Dali headphones i should get that FLAC sound quality because the AAC codec will handle the transfer And the Dali headphones will do the rest?

Cheers

 

[tomb]

Thanks Raketen so if I read correctly so long as the format being streamed ie Flac from an IPhone to my Dali headphones i should get that FLAC sound quality because the AAC codec will handle the transfer And the Dali headphones will do the rest?

Cheers

No.

You might as well stick to mp3 if you are going to use Bluetooth. Higher quality files won't matter, because too much of it is degraded in the bluetooth chain.

If you are using wired connections all the way through, then FLAC all the way. Otherwise, just use what sounds best to you in mp3.

 

[Raketen]

Thanks Raketen so if I read correctly so long as the format being streamed ie Flac from an IPhone to my Dali headphones i should get that FLAC sound quality because the AAC codec will handle the transfer And the Dali headphones will do the rest?

Cheers

No, AAC will still be compressing the audio. There is no bluetooth codec that does not compress the audio as of yet AFAIK

No.

You might as well stick to mp3 if you are going to use Bluetooth. Higher quality files won't matter, because too much of it is degraded in the bluetooth chain.

If you are using wired connections all the way through, then FLAC all the way. Otherwise, just use what sounds best to you in mp3.

If you lossy compress (or 'transcode') already compressed lossy it can sound noticably worse than lossy compressing from lossless sources. Listening to lossless over bluetooth does degrade the information but to a lesser degree than lossy over bluetooth. https://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Transcoding

Of course it depends on the degrees of compression at play, and not everyone will find the difference noteworthy- but the point of OP post is to maximize quality over bluetooth and that is one way of doing it. People can always test if its worth the effort for themselves by making lossy copies of a lossless file and comparing them over bluetooth.

 

[SouthMark45]

Thanks both..... appreciated