Sorry if this is a newbie question and I should know better but I’m struggling to work this out!
I use ARC with a couple of DACS (a FIIO K5 and a Hidiz s3) and it works fine with both of these. I leave the ‘playback - cellular’ setting on ‘original format’ and it works great.
I also use ARC in my car with android auto. It insists on converting to 48Khz and 24 bit but it seems to be doing this locally on the phone, not doing it in my ROCK. I have been into Muse and told it to just convert to 48K when I’ve got it connected to my car profile but it seems that often I’m streaming at 192k so using a lot of data and I’m then down sampling on the phone which kind of seems like the worst of both worlds?
Am I missing a setting? Ideally I’d like the ROCK to convert to 48k / 24bit and then stream that as it’d be a better quality / reliability / bandwidth compromise compared to what’s happening now. If that’s not possible, I guess my best bet is to change the playback quality to CD format within the setup once I jump in the car? If I can’t convert at the ROCK end and stream what the car seems to want, I’d rather it just stream CD and upsample slightly on the phone.
Thank you - I’ve just read through this and it seems like I’m not missing a setting……. It’s telling me that, in original format, it’s sending original format and then converting at the phone end.
If I’m still misunderstanding, I’m sorry - it’s just that, reading this, it’s doing exactly what I described and (other than dropping it down to cd quality in the car) there’s not much I can do about it?
When I’m using Roon at home, I can drop the bitrate before the transport phase - I do this in Muse when streaming to my Denon 250 in the kitchen as, otherwise, the Denon converts it anyway. It seems odd that the Muse conversion I set in Arc is done at the phone end rather than in the ROCK?
With Roon in the house, Muse bitrate conversion happens in the ROCK (or whatever server you’re using) if I understand it correctly?
Why, when streaming, would Muse instead work on the phone? It would make more sense to do it ‘as it does normally with Roon in the house’ as you can then send the bitrate you need rather than sending too much and throwing away if you’re using a car / not using a DAC that can handle it.
It’s not a massive issue but, as ARC figures out if it needs to use the Fiio profile I have for the DAC or the Android Auto profile, I don’t know why that only alters the behaviour at the car end? If Muse has to happen in the phone for ARC (for some reason I don’t understand) then maybe the developers could move the streaming quality toggle switch into the profile rather than in the settings? That way it would automatically scale back the bitrate transmitted when it knows it’s connected to the car
and this is fixed by choosing the streaming conversion setting, which happens on the server before sending.
DSP happens on the phone and I’m not sure why. Of course it makes sense if someone performs upsampling, and maybe they thought it’s easier to do it in one place rather than two depending on the specific settings
Thank you for your reply but you are basically confirming exactly what I said it was doing in my first post. My confusion here stems from me asking ‘am I missing a setting’ and you telling me that I was. Everything since has been different ways of saying the same thing.
If anyone else has further input for A.N. Other setting that alters behaviour in favour of what I’ve requested I’d appreciate it.
If not, I’ll put in a feature request - I think the setting for bitrate that is being sent (which you can see from my posts above, I clearly understand where to set it now) is best to live in the profile within arc rather than the overall settings. It then would select what’s needed when it ‘sees’ the car vs what it needs when it ‘sees’ my DAC.
I think you are confusing MUSE and the streaming quality setting and it seemed like you were missing the latter because what you wrote in this particular part is just not the case if you configure the streaming quality setting:
The streaming quality conversion happens on the server and then the resulting smaller file is streamed to ARC. There is no downsampling on the phone in this case, if using the streaming quality setting.
MUSE, however, is independent of the streaming quality setting, and you are correct that it happens on the phone. Like I wrote, I don’t know for sure why they made that choice, but I gave a possible reason.
If you want MUSE to happen on the server, that would indeed be Feature Suggestions
