Bluetooth audio streaming poor quality
 

2015 S550 4MATIC
Galaxy Note9
I purchased the car about 3 weeks ago and have been fairly disappointed with the sound quality when streaming music from my phone over bluetooth. It almost sounds like a tweeter is out, it's just missing the mid tone punch.

Usually on all my bluetooth headphones/speakers it's best to set the phone volume as high as possible, this has produced the best results as far as quality. However...on this car the opposite is true! While on a long drive I lowered the phone volume to about 60% and the sound system just woke up. Sound is now very balanced while maintaining that surround-sound feel.

If you're having similar issues I would suggest trying the above. I came from a 2013 A8 with a glorious sound system and was begginning to hate this car because it just wasn't up to par. Now I'm a happy camper =).

Did you go into settings and modify Bass-Mid-Treb Did you confirm seating position of audio...

Yep. I tried messing with surround sound position, balance/fade, and the equalizer. Still sounded horrible.

Ahhh… Streaming music is more than likely the culprit. As a test, download a song say from iTunes. I am sure you will be pleasantly surprised by the sound quality from Bluetooth. Most non paid streaming services are low quality. Only the paid and upgraded services will give you the quality you are looking for.... I'm blown away with the factory 1500 watt system and Bluetooth. On my 14, i am able to do a dump of all the songs to the Hard Drive and well as dump some old CD's. I also have Videos on the SD card as well as music. Much easier to just dump hundreds of songs to SD or the hard drive on the older cars.

I'm using Pandora, and the quality in my previous A8 was fine. I get the same audio quality playing songs I have downloaded on my phone as I do over Pandora.

These cars have a great system but it lacks proper bass response so folks turn the bass up and it messes with everything. I am probably going to add a sub to my system to round things out. A seperate sub allows you to use the rest of the system for mid bass, mids and highs, which works great.

I did notice a few posts on installing aftermarket subs. Shame that it's something you have to do on a car like this. Lowering the volume on my phone reduces the amount of bass, effectively, which is probably why the system sounds better, albeit not as good as it should.