Porsche Macan Forums

Taz wrote: ↑Tue May 15, 2018 9:36 pm As ‘happy days’ said, most features are already in the car, BUT the voice activated phone book is brilliant. You can also dictate text messages.

Well - when I first got the 718S with Carplay, I had an interesting SMS conversation with my daughter. The system was pretty awful and simply did not recognise half the words I was saying (unlike direct to the iPhone which is simply brilliant).

My daughter hadn't a clue what was going on - she thought I was drunk while texting until I told her I was using the car. I pretty much gave up after that, but it is pretty useful for starting phone calls.

Car Play.

Only worth it for one related group of functions, namely Maps, Nav and especially Live Traffic all of which are much better than the PCM version.

That said if I am going on the Mway I tend plug in the iPhone and have a look along the intended route to see of any traffic issues, never tend to use the SatNav until I get nearer to an unknown destination.

I see zero point in paying money for streaming music and paying again for a data SIM so that rules out quite a few of the Apps.

In car voice control is useless for my Lancastrian accent.

Not found any use at all for in car WiFi, in car passengers can use their own data via 4G. My Mrs’s iPhone and iPad are set up to connect but in 20 months she has used it once.

To each there own though.

hi

i was considering an apple carplay retro fit

looking on youtube, it would seem if you wire connect the phone , the music sounds a lot better. i have to say when i bluetooth the phone and listen to apple music, i have to crank up the volume so loud , then if i switch back to radio, i have to turn the volume down as my ears would bleed.

can anyone confirm is sounds better when connect via wire ?

thanks
john

CarPlay in the Macan only works wired.

Having said that, the audio profiles supported over the lightning connector (the defining baseline for CarPlay) is considerably better than the supported bluetooth wireless audio profile. This would be more pronounced if you're playing lossless content or very high bitrate, or multi-channel audio.

pingman777 wrote: ↑Tue Jul 03, 2018 11:21 am hi

i was considering an apple carplay retro fit

looking on youtube, it would seem if you wire connect the phone , the music sounds a lot better. i have to say when i bluetooth the phone and listen to apple music, i have to crank up the volume so loud , then if i switch back to radio, i have to turn the volume down as my ears would bleed.

can anyone confirm is sounds better when connect via wire ?

thanks
john

I had a similar issue with airpods (bear with me). They had no volume at all. However, unlinking them via bluetooth and relinking agian cured the problem. Might do no harm to 'forget this device' and then re-pair?

FWIW, audio from CarPlay, iPod mode, bluetooth and Porsche services like Amazon Music, are all very much quieter than the radio or jukebox audio playback.

Where the phone volume controls have some input, you generally need to have that on 100% to level things up.

PCM doesn't seem to do a good job of audio level equalisation between sources.
The last version (3.5?) was much better.

pingman777 wrote: ↑Tue Jul 03, 2018 11:21 am hi

i was considering an apple carplay retro fit

looking on youtube, it would seem if you wire connect the phone , the music sounds a lot better. i have to say when i bluetooth the phone and listen to apple music, i have to crank up the volume so loud , then if i switch back to radio, i have to turn the volume down as my ears would bleed.

can anyone confirm is sounds better when connect via wire ?

thanks
john

I use Apple Carplay in multiple vehicles wired and Bluetooth. The Macan can only be wired and is better sound imo than the Bluetooth setups. Not that the Bluetooth quality is bad.

But yes the audio is lower volume than radio / Sd Cards in all formats of Carplay in all vehicles.

There are some albums which are naturally loader than others and i normalise all my MP3 / Flac files to all be at the same volume level using some pc software. Not much good for my Apple Music though

I found streaming/casting or using AirPlay at home has similar volume vagaries with my A/V receiver or other wireless speakers. It's just one of those things in life that never quite works out.

At least with the Macan, I've got into the habit of turning the PCM volume right down when I park up, to avoid any embarrassing Solid HarmoniE blaring out when I come back

For what it's worth, I think Car Play is great, and the voice control is excellent (even with an Aussie accent), especially when using Apple Music. Spotify also works well, but no voice control, so a bit of poking at the screen required which is not ideal.

I have found Bluetooth streaming to be very poor, audio quality is simply not there with the typical mp3 downloaded.

There is a vast difference in sound quality dependent upon the sampling rate of the music file.

MP3 files recorded at 320bps sound pretty good but in FLAC or above the sound quality is vastly better.