[frank70]

After having read multiple times here in this forum that the IX´s fantastic B&W audio can only be enjoyed fully when uncompressed audio files are played, i decided to give Apple Music a try. Until now i have always just used Spotify, but this does not (yet) offer uncompressed audio, and Apple Music more or less does.

I can indeed hear some difference, although it is not massive for me. But maybe this also has something to do with age : i am 54 years young.

Now the question : on my Iphone Pro i can choose between Lossless and High Resolution Lossless Audio (24 bit/48 khz vs 24 bit/192 khz). I have chosen the Lossless setting for now to prevent my iphone memory getting full too fast, as the difference in filesize between the both is according to Apple for a 3 minute song :
6 MB for High Quality 256 kbp
36 MB for Lossless 24bit/48khz
145 MB for Lossless High Res 24bit/192khz

Can i hear a noticeable difference between the 2 Lossless Settings at my age in the IX´s B&W audio system ?

Then another issue. Maybe a bug. I am sometimes having issues when i try to go to a next/previous song using the IX´s controls on steering wheel, center console, or gesture control. All of them will - sometimes - not work. And sometimes they will work. When it does not work i can only use the touchscreen with Apple music in carplay, and press next song over there. That will work, but all the other possibilities will not work.

When i use the scroll wheel on the steering wheel to go to the next song it will say : Media-CarPlay-´a moment please´ in the head up display.

I have a Iphone 15 Pro on IOS 18.5, and my IX uses 03/2025.47 Idrive software.

Does anyone else have the same issue, and/or a trick to solve this issue when it happens ?

[NomoTesla]

Since the iPhone streams carplay using wifi, you might want to check into the codecs being used by the iPhone and iX. I doubt very much you will get any benefit from lossless anything using carplay. It's still going to get lossy compressed when the audio is transmitted to your car.

The audio from the car's built-in Spotify app sounds far superior to the same audio streamed from my iPhone's Spotify app using carplay. I can very easily hear the difference, and the iPhone audio is clearly inferior.

[frank70]

I also found the quality when using spotify through carplay less than using the build in spotify, but maybe this was because at that time i always had problems playing audio through Carplay. It would often be really muted for some reason (i read more people had this same issue here in the forum), so i just gave up using spotify through Carplay a long time ago. As i did not use spotify through carplay for a long time, i do not know if this issue is solved now or not, and if there really is a quality difference between the 2 spotify´s still at this moment.

But i really find Apple Music audio quality (using lossless settings) better than the build in BMW spotify app, even when using wireless carplay. I do not know if there would be a difference using wireless carplay or connecting the iphone to the car with a USB cable ?

[LuisBoston]

Apple Music hi-res lossless all downloaded to my phone works fantastically on my iX.

My 8,000 songs take 200GB (no all high res lossless, but whatever can be, is).

[darylp310]

Hires Lossless is overkill for wireless CarPlay since it’ll be downsampled to 24bit/44Khz for the audio head unit, but the regular Lossless sounds amazing in the iX.

To get the real benefit make sure you are playing digitally remastered songs in Apple Music. You’re the same age as me and some of those albums we like from the 80s and 90s sound anemic on the Bowers and Wilkins system. Luckily they are all being remastered little by little.

As a test trying listening to some of the modern Top 40 songs. Even if you don’t like Morgan Wallen or Sabrina Carpenter, they have the best mastering engineers in the business, so you can turn the volume up and appreciate how the B&W system recreates the latest and greatest digital music with no distortion and superb clarity. It’s huge quality difference from how older stuff like Prince or Van Halen sounds when not remastered.

[darylp310]

Then another issue. Maybe a bug. I am sometimes having issues when i try to go to a next/previous song using the IX´s controls on steering wheel, center console, or gesture control. All of them will - sometimes - not work.

frank70

I had another idea. If you are 1) seeing lag in your infotainment controls and 2) aren’t blown away by the B&W audio, it’s quite possible that your head unit is running out of memory and you need to do a reset.

Try it once and let us know if you notice any improvement. In my case, it seems to be required once every 4-5 months. It’s subtle, but I notice that the audio is slightly quieter and not as clear, it's as if the DSP is starving for memory and can't process the audio at full bandwidth.

It’s a shot in the dark, but I thought there might be a correlation between your two issues!! ������