FLAC Files
 

I bought a 256GB usb stick so I could rip all my old CD's and play them in the car. I'm kinda a music quality snob, so I wanted to use minimal compression, Flac seemed like a good choice.

Problem is that they sound very flat, all of them. Almost like the car's DSP is not processing them like it does Sirius or FM. MP3's sound fine, so it's something about Flac. I checked the converter and there is no sound processing going on in the conversion.

Anyone else experience this?

All my music is on flac, the E43 plays it wonderfully. I used Nero to rip my CDs.
My GLS, however, doesnt like FLAC so I had to recode them as MP3 for that car.

I'll have to try nero, the Flac's sound weak even on my home stereo. They should sound exactly like the CD did.

Are you playing FLACs off of a streaming bluetooth connection (bad) or direct connection to an HD connected to your AVR (good)?

They are on a class 10 USB stick plugged to USB 2.

That should sound good. What a bummer. What software do you use to rip them to the USB stick? I used MusicBee. If you can't get it to sound good, MusicBee has a feature that will convert to MP3 on the fly. Maybe try that with 10 tracks and see if the audio is improved?

I downloaded some freeware to rip the CD to Flac, not sure of the name as it's at home and I'm at work. I'll check out music bee.

The software can also produce an MP3, so I'm going to try that next and see if there's a difference.

Something isn't right here. I have a 2018 E400 with the High End Burmester and FLAC files play fine. In fact, the difference between a 16 bit MP3 version and a 24 bit FLAC version of the same music is noticeable, which surprised me for car audio.

HOWEVER, the manual for my COMAND system states the following formats are supported: MP3, WMA and AAC. FLAC is not stated as a supported format, and it seems that ability to play FLAC may be system dependent. By system, I mean the combination of your encoder and how COMAND processes music.

One thing you might try to trouble shoot this is to download a bona fide FLAC file from a place like HD Tracks to see if its a conversion problem or a playback problem.

I'm pretty nuts about music quality too. Most of my higher resolution music is in ALAC format rather than FLAC. I don't think there is really any difference in sound quality in these lossless formats. But it seems ALAC is a little bit better tolerated across platforms due to its ubiquity in the Apple kingdom. The music extension for ALAC is .M4A, which is a stated supported format for MB COMAND. M4A is also the file type for AAC.

So you have options. I'd like to know how things work out for you.

Good Luck!

Strange... Page 288 of my manual does mention FLAC.

• MP3
• WMA
• AAC formats
• WAV (up to 16-bit resolution)
• FLAC (up to 16-bit resolution)
• ALAC (up to 16-bit resolution)

Absolutely... MP3 are completely flat sounding in comparison! I have been stepping down the DSF sample rates >258kHz to 192kHz and these playback without any issues.

Adding data from my manual to confirm ability to play FLACs, although I haven't confirmed playback in my own car since I burn to MP3 for broadest acceptance on all my platforms....(except at home).

https://cimg9.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mbw...b4202742fa.jpg

Hmm, that's interesting. My information comes from page 277 of the file MY_OM_and_COMAND_E-sedan_213_0223_13_Ed_E_ENG.pdf that I have used as a reference.
Obviously there are later versions that have different information. It is also interesting it states "up to 16 bit resolution" even though 24 bit files play fine in my car.

The COMAND media interface is a pretty rinky-dink media interface, but don't get me going here. I would not be surprised if there are some incompatibility issues that arise, depending on how user input is presented to the system. I hope there are not different versions of COMAND that cause issues for an identical set of circumstances.

Hope you get this working.

I think that it's just as stated: no guarantee that different encoders and different memory cards/sticks will all function.

One thing that I would love is a way to skip tracks from the comand wheel when NOT on the media screen. From Navi, I can only do it with the touchpad (which I hate) or the steering wheel if I have the appropriate media screen up on the left side of the progressive setting.

Has anyone had luck trying to play back a ripped DTS DVD? Would be cool to listen to Hell freezes over in DTS.

On this same subject, does anyone have recommendations for good DolbyD music, I played a few DD demos and they sound very good in the car, good separation and placement.

So can someone tell me, will I get better quality sound using a FLAC file from HD Tracks, or from ripping a cd to a FLAC file with a converter program? Or is there no difference? Thanks for the education!

If your CD is a typical 16 bit recording, there should not be a difference. It is possible there could be some minor differences in the file itself, but it should sound the same with both FLAC files

HDTracks often has 24 bit music available and you don't typically get that on a CD. If the original recording is quite good, the 24 bit recording will sound a bit better than the FLAC from a 16 bit recording. On a lot of older music and too much new stuff, I find it hard to tell the difference between 16 bit and 24 bit recordings because the orignal music source is crap.

HDTracks will often have 'remastered' versions of old music, and in some cases this sounds better than the original release even between two 16 bit files.

The point for this thread is that HDTracks will use an industry standard CODEC for the generation of the FLAC file, so you are pretty certain it has the best chance to work with COMAND.

So if I could continue to take advantage of bigger brains than mine, can someone help confirm or correct me in what I believe the steps are to enjoying the fullest capabilities of the Burmester (non-3D) stereo in my E300:
1. First determine that my system will play back FLAC or ALAC files. And I'm guessing I should look for that in the owner's guide in the system itself, NOT the printed book?
2. Download a good program for ripping my CDs to FLAC or ALAC files. Suggestions here? I would be using my Mac, so that's why I lean toward the ALAC format, but could also use a windows machine if necessary.
3. Transfer the files to a USB stick, obviously one with plenty of space for the files.

Thanks in advance for the help! I'm an old-school former audiophile*; no home system any longer, I do most of my listening in the car. Bought my first CD player (grudgingly) in 1985. So after digital finally acknowledges (and sometimes works to correct) the shortcomings of that format, we get MP3s forced on us. The fact that there is a reasonable alternative is both a revelation and a relief to me. Thanks for helping to bring me up to speed.

*Audio Research electronics, Linn LP12, Thiel 3.6, and a ton of beautiful, glorious vinyl.

Based on what I've seen, the best way to find out if a FLAC or ALAC file will play is to try and play one. The manual I had said that FLAC wasn't supported, yet it plays just fine. Depending on the documentation you get, you might be misled.

I've used XLD and dBPowerAmp, the latter being one of the standards. It runs on Mac and PC. It costs money, but you can get a free trial. Frankly, if you are using a Mac I don't see why you wouldn't just use iTunes. It will work fine for what you want to do. Programs like dBPowerAmp let you do a lot more with how the files are written and tagged, but ALAC is ALAC and iTunes will do it fine. It's also really simple to use and there is lots of documentation and support online.

You can transfer the files to a USB stick, but I like the SD card solution. You probably have a couple of SD card slots in the console. The card fits neatly in there and can stay there. If you have an SD card slot in your computer this is as easy as a USB stick. The one I got is also rated for higher temperatures so you only need to remove it when you update your music files.

I never went the vinyl route, but switched over to fully digital just a few years ago. It makes things really easy to access, especially with a media front end like Roon. But there is a bit of a learning curve like anything else!

Very helpful, thank you!!

Update, so I tried MusicBee and one other FLAC programs to rip a CD, none made any difference. Just today I played the FLAC files and decided to play around with the cars music settings.

I typically run with surround on and focus to the front. I noticed turning surround off and using focus all 4 seats made a large improvement on some of the albums. Some still sound flat, others sound good.

I also used a DVD ripper to copy Eagles hell freezes over onto my usb stick. While it works, I don't think I'm getting Dolby Digital sound, just stereo. Gonna keep playing around to see if I can master this.

I may have missed this, but have you taken the same song and played it as an MP3 and a FLAC version, taken from the same source?
As I thought about this it seemed that if your car didn't 'handle' FLAC, it wouldn't play at all or you hear some sort of gibberish (like it's skipping around through bits of music). But you are hearing full songs, and they sound different under different settings. So I'm wondering if you are hearing differences between well recorded and poorly recorded music. Probably not, but 'flat' sounding music usually seems to come from simply bad recordings.
When I first got my new car and High End Burmester system I had to drive up to Boston and back, about six hours each way. I spent a lot of time 'auditioning' the new car stereo. Most of the listening was done with the stereo set in "Pure" mode. That gave a pretty decent sound stage and music I could relate to my home stereo rig. But some of the settings were disorienting. The '3D' mode is fun. Contrary to what one might expect it totally messes up the sound staging, but seems to just make music come from all over the place. I will admit it is fun to listen to it this way, but strictly speaking, it looses a lot of the musicality I associate with my home stereo. So it certainly seems possible that with certain music, you may get something unsatisfying with certain car stereo settings.
Another reason I ask about a direct comparison of the same song in mp3 and FLAC has to do with what I've heard is the major criticism of the base Burmester. It has two midbass speakers in the front footwells. I've heard some people say it lacks the bass they like. So I could see that with some songs you are used to hearing good bass in you might just be missing good bass in the car. But the non-flat sounding songs may not be so bass-dependent.
The High End Burmester has it's own subwoofer in the trunk. It definitely serves up bass. The bass here is tuneful, in the sense you can hear tonal articulation rather than the 'one-note' bass you get in really cheap stereos. It does that well There is also lots of bass and it has good slam. My major criticism of the whole system is that this bass is a bit muddy. The bass notes sound rounded over and are not crisp. In my opinion, the bass settings are too high as they are set by default, so the high bass balance and the slight muddiness give the music sort of a plodding character (this is sort of an exaggeration, but to make a point). At least for me I found that turning the bass balance down from it's preset to something just a little less than half of that gave music with much better musical character. So, again, tuning the system to suit your tastes is certainly worthwhile.

I remember you mentioning in another thread that you use the ExFat format, so that's how I formatted my SD card - just haven't had the opportunity to test it yet.

I wonder if there are better (faster/smoother) transfers with this format? exFAT is optimized for things like SD cards and USB devices.
I remember reading several years ago that some file formats are perceived to sound better because they 'unpack' the data better to the I/O bus (if I recall this was WAV vs. FLAC).
Frankly, I don't know squat about this, but I've seen this sort of speculation...

I'm going to try the mp3 vs flac thing. I am pretty happy with the bass performance, I know there is no dedicated subwoofer but the Burrmester base system goes low enough for me and hit's good on rock music. My days of blurring the mirrors with sub base are done, now just concentrating on trying to hear the TV, and the wife sometimes.

Different note, anyone notice the stereo cut's off the first few seconds of a song, like it's fading in. Is that a setting somewhere I missed?