[Closed] Which SHOULD sound better.. 3.5mm Aux cable, or Bluetooth??

How good are your ears?

Is it an oxygen free copper, gold plated and directional 3.5mm aux cable or a rubbish one?

Bluetooth audio uses compression doesn't it? The cable should sound better, whether you can hear the difference is another thing.

I'd be interested in the process for BT in the phone.

Does it all go through the phone DAC then get converted to 'bluetooth format' (is there one) then onto the Echo and through another BT conversion to some other format prior to the DAC on there or does the MP3 get sent in native encoding?

Also, what level is the original encoded at - I'd imagine that will have as much bearing on the eventual sound quality (and mask any differences).

Think it will depend on:
1) the compression level used by the Bluetooth encoding
2) which device has the better DAC

As I noted on the Amazon/Dot thread, hooking up by 3.5mm presumably means there are two amplifiers in the circuit, so make sure you've not got one turned to 11 and the other at 1 (or vice versa) otherwise you'll get distortion and clipping.

Bluetooth is capable of 328kbps, top end of MP3 quality, the BT3 can receive at that, so that's not the limiting factor. Next question is what rate the codec is that the Echo uses to transmit.

If it's higher or the same as your source files - 320? 256? that's not a problem either. Did a bit of googling on Echo BT codec, and people ave asked amazon, but not got an answer.

Then you're looking at which DAC you'd rather listen through, and if it's the BT3, which it probably is, then you want your music digital until it gets there, so Bluetooth, assuming amazon aren't using a crappy old codec on the Echo.

I found early bluetooth adapters sounded terrible, but more modern adapters i've used (v4.2) are indistinguishable from a cable to my ears.

Ned - interesting... This was my thinking.."which will turn 0/1s into music better, the Echo or the speakers..."

I'll give it a punt via BT and then feed back..

Oh, rubber buccaneer - I had the option of paying £3 for a 3.5mm cable, or £99.99 for a unidirectional, magsheilded, anti gravity cable.... Of course, the speedy one is MUCH MUCH bettered... 😉

DrP

Bluetooth audio uses compression doesn't it?

If he's listening to Amazon Music over his Dot, I reckon the compression used to stream it is the limiting factor.

Bose have display in a local shop with three headphones "wireless with noise cancelling", "wireless without noise cancelling", "cable with noise cancelling". They all sound pretty good if a little bass heavy compared with say Grados, and in a noisy shop the noise cancelling worked very well. The high frequencies were identical to my ears but the cable phones had a smoother bass thud than the wireless which had a slight grain to it.

Its been a while since i looked at audio over bluetooth, but it used to be the case that most implementations used the A2DP profile, with the SBC codec.

Generally i assume that wired is a better audio quality, although as mol says in this case the limitation is more likely to be in the streaming format from the provider to the dot itself.

the speedy one is MUCH MUCH bettered

Old BT used to be really bad, I had several adapters and some songs wouldnt even play! I dont have the Echo Dot but do have a UE Boom and the sound quality is the same as my cabled mini rig speaker!

Speaking of compression, I recently found out that Airplay is lossless which surprised me.

Can I ask any IPhone 6 users if the Bluetooth works well with your phone in camlbak? Wondering if distance and bag material stops Bluetooth. Recommended in the ear earphones?

Range of BT is about ten metres IIRC. I can't see the bag causing a problem unless you've got the limited edition lead-lined Camelbak.

Recommended headphones should probably be a separate thread (not least because I want to ask the same question...) There have been -many- previous "what headphones" threads though.

BT doesn't "flow" thru water so don't put your iPhone underneath your full 3 litre bladder!