Has anyone tried setting up the personal sound profile? I set it up and it sounded amazing with the sample music that was used to set it up but when I switched to Apple Music through CarPlay, or regular FM it sounds no where near as good as the sample music. Any ideas?

 

did you save the profile? I agree though. I thought I had mine good but it sounds kinda hollow now.

 

yes, I saved it. I’m kinda pissed cause I have the 4D burmester and I heard what the system could really sound like. I’m not sure why the playback isn’t as good as the sample.

 

Maybe the sample music is in Dolby Atmos or something or some other form of hd music is all I can think of.

 

yea. Could be.

 

When using Apple Music are you using wireless carplay or wired? I noticed that wired sound quality is more crispier similary to the setup.

 

I’m using wireless. I don’t want to give up that convenience

 

I set up personal profile and 4D and it sounds great if you also tether your phone to the car (or buy a data plan) and use the Apple Music app (or one of the other available apps). When using CarPlay, you get sound that is "OK" but does not have the capability of the apps built into the car. That's because CarPlay does not have enough bandwidth to transmit all of the data to the Burmester. It's not a surprise, Apple informs you that it cannot deliver Dolby Atmos over bluetooth (same goes for when you are using headphones, for example).

I took the time to fiddle with the Apple Music app built into the car and found that, yes, it does deliver higher quality sound as it is getting the data over the internet rather than through bluetooth. The "pain point" is you need to login to Apple Music with your credentials and such, but it's a one-time event - once you're in you're in. All of your music and playlists, etc. are right there for your enjoyment. You will find that music encoded with Dolby Atmos really pops, but not all music is available that way. If available with Dolby Atmos, it will be noted on the album label. Music without Dolby Atmos also sounds a bit better, too, at least to my ear. CarPlay is very simple to connect and does so automatically. Tethering the phone so that the Apple Music app built into the car functions is a bit more persnickety in that you have be sure the phone is tethered first and it is not always automatic. A previous poster had an idea to build a Shortcut into your phone that will fire up tethering automatically once the car connects to CarPlay and I found that it works quite well - not 100% but perhaps 90% of the time.

That's my very simple explanation and I'm sure someone with more technical bonafides can chime in to either correct me or enhance my answer.

 

thanks for the detailed response. Do you think 60gb a month is enough to use for data? My Verizon plan gives me 60gb a month to hotspot.

 

Everyone's data "mileage" will vary. I just checked my carrier plan's usage and during the last 2 weeks that I've been tethering my phone the to car I have used 1.84 gb of data and I'd say that I've used the vehicle's native Apple Music app >50% of the time I drive (~500 miles). In my view, it has hardly put a dent into my data plan. Music is not as big of a data hog as is video and I've not used my phone much for video this month (at least off of WiFi). So if your usage is similar to mine or even more, 60 gb seems to be plenty for music.

By the way, the other 50% of my driving has been on plain, old CarPlay which also uses data, so that appears to be good news, data-wise. And I'm using an iPhone 16 Pro with AT&T.

 

thanks again.

 

I setup a personal sound profile and primarily play FLAC files on a USB drive or through wireless Android Auto. A note on wireless Android Auto or Apple Car Play is that they uses Wi-Fi not Bluetooth for audio. This means that the audio quality is not compromised by the low bandwidth Bluetooth connection. I'm not sure if Apple music will send Dolby Atmos data in that mode but I don't see why it can't.

Regarding Dolby Atmos, the sound profile is using a sample in that format which is why it sounds so amazing. When creating a Dolby Atmos sound track, you must do so during the recording. It's a spatial sound recording technology where the artist can place a sound object anywhere in a 360 degree spherical space. The vast majority of music was never recorded in this way. I don't have Apple music but my understanding is that their Dolby Atmos music selection is very limited. That is because the artist must have recorded for that intentionally. There are ways to upscale to Dolby Atmos using various tools and even AI, but it's not the same as native Atmos.

The reality is, you are not going to listen to many music tracks in Dolby Atmos even if you use a service like Apple music that supports it. Not yet at least. As more music is recorded this way the opportunity will increase. The FLAC files i listen to on my USB is about the best you are going to get in the car outside of an actual Atmos experience. Still, that depends on the quality of the original recording on the CD. Getting remastered CDs and converting them to FLAC is a great way to go. Still not Atmos but sounds great. I do this for my favorite music whenever possible. I have nearly every Rush and Pink Floyd album recorded this way and it sounds amazing.

 

U just read that as of the current version of iOS, Dolby Atmos CAN be played through CarPlay.
You have to make sure it's enabled in the settings of the Music app on the iPhone.
However, the car maker has to support it and I can't find any info on Mercedes specifically.

By the way, the connection when using CarPlay isn't Bluetooth, it's through device to device WiFi. Bluetooth is just used to initiate the connection. So the bandwidth is there.

Here is some info on the Dolby site:
https://professional.dolby.com/music/dolby-atmos-for-cars/carplay-support-for-dolby-atmos/#gref