Whats wrong with Shaker?

[Starman]

I use pure USB stick for the best quality. I always ripped my music at the max bit rate.

I like to consider myself an audio-enthusiast. I built my own dedicated home theater with a highly sound engineered environment (sound proofing). I have a 7.1 theater system (Atmos soon) with 200 watt monoblocks powering each paradigm speaker with 2 Outlaw 12" subs.

Maybe its that I have a Convertible but I turned mine up yesterday in my garage to test without even cranking it the bass was rattling my house, specially on bass focused songs. The sound quality is not great but in a Convertible with the top off, that doesn't matter much. Its not a Mark Levinson (although its much louder).

Unless you really are into bass that shakes your neighbors house, the Shaker is excellent for a car stereo in my opinion.

People may not realize that their sound quality problems are coming from their sources. Bluetooth is never a good option and will never sound good.

Still those files on a USB, stick it into the slot in your glove-box.

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[dwaleke]

Lossless bluetooth aptX could be great. I haven't used it yet.

Does anyone know if MFT supports aptX streaming?

 

[Buhbuhj]

I actually have too much bass in my car but it may be for several reasons:

If you set the sound stage to be rear dominant the bass will be much louder(It sounds best to me with it set 3 clicks to the rear from the middle).

A lot of the music I listen to is very bass heavy to start out with, and thanks to the cutoff on the shaker sub being at what seems like 100hz I get so much bass when all I want out of it is 50hz or less.

When I was pulling out the shitty 6 inch speakers the shaker came with and putting in some decent jbl and pioneers I decided to stuff my sub box with polyfill in hopes that it would remove some of the weird reverb sounds it was making(it did but it also made the sub louder).

 

[Desmondo]

Lossless bluetooth aptX could be great. I haven't used it yet.

Does anyone know if MFT supports aptX streaming?

Yup - I'm wondering the same thing.. about MFT or SYNC3 vehicles.

 

[uglygun]

Muddy mids and weak highs.

This. Rant time because this exact issue popped into my head as I left work and a song came on that I wanted to crank.

My 2005 with stock shaker speakers and amps sounds better with a Kenwood aftermarket deck and the conversion wiring for the preamps.

The 2005 can go full volume and maintain more clarity with richer highs and lows. Regardless of audio source piped into it, cd, bluetooth, mp3.

My 2015 9 speaker "premium" "shaker" is shit. That is the first time I have used an expletive on this forum but it is warranted. The 2015 audio cannot be saved with tweaking the EQ. The sirus audio only further illustrates the poor audio of the system.

I WAS LISTENING TO QUIET RIOT TODAY, ON SIRIUS WHICH I SUSPECT WAS A CONTRIBUTOR, AND "BANG YOUR HEAD" WAS A MUDDY COMPLETELY MISERABLE SOUNDING MUMBLE FEST. NO AUDIO TWEAKING COULD FIX IT.

The 9 speaker system is a stinking putrid coil of rope that detracts from the driving experience when turned up. Mudd is not an audio quality I look for. Hell my 95 Mach 460 sounds better when playing from an MP3 capable head unit and that car has dreaded Flowmaster drone with the windows up.

my 2015 turns a very high bit rate Tom Petty's Running Down A Dream into a sad lame mumbling crap fest.

I was stuck with it if I wanted to grab a 0% financed 2015, looked for 12 speaker shaker pro equipped cars and there were none.

 

[uglygun]

Sirius is very low quality. On par with regular fm broadcasts. Sometimes it seems worse than that.

CD/usb with high quality files/hd radio are significantly better.

Had my car 2 months and I wont be extending Sirius. It really is horrible quality.

high bit rate mp3 or cd is only thing I use and still I suffer.

 

[RevvdMedia]

I will admit one thing I don't get. I remember an article from Ford regarding the sound insulation on the car and how it would attribute to better audio quality. When you slap craptastic speakers in the mix, what is the point of advertising all that sound insulation and sound quality if the speakers sound like garbage?

I really wish manufacturers would put out audio option packages that came with good aftermarket speakers. I understand raised costs and a lack of internal control doing this, but man had Ford put out a speaker upgrade package with GOOD speakers - even for 1000 or 1500 bucks, I probably would have jumped on it, even knowing I could install the speakers myself for less aftermarket.

 

[XDsm]

While it's certainly no audiophile system, I think the Shaker Pro sounds pretty good for a stock system. Miles better than the "premium" sound system that came in my WRX.

Sirius sound quality is horrendous and I am disappointed that I have to stream Spotify over Bluetooth with my Android phone. Spotify Premium offers extremely good audio quality that gets cancelled out with Bluetooth.

 

[Desmondo]

I use pure USB stick for the best quality. I always ripped my music at the max bit rate.
.

Here's the current problem with the USB approach: how do you navigate say a 2hour live recording (concert, DJ mix, etc.) when you want to choose different parts of the track?

The fast forward / rewind takes FOREVER.

 

[uglygun]

Here's the current problem with the USB approach: how do you navigate say a 2hour live recording (concert, DJ mix, etc.) when you want to choose different parts of the track?

The fast forward / rewind takes FOREVER.

The file structure system sucks as well.

every other system I have can let me choose to arrange by title or artist.

On the 2015? Nope, screws my play list into alphabetical. If I want to get the play list to that of my other cars I have to number the tracks of every sub-folder/artist.

Also, having to browse the folders off the lagging touch screen and do play all sucks. Unless somebody knows the way to jump folders off of the steering wheel.

 

[sauerkraut]

The file structure system sucks as well.

every other system I have can let me choose to arrange by title or artist.

On the 2015? Nope, screws my play list into alphabetical. If I want to get the play list to that of my other cars I have to number the tracks of every sub-folder/artist.

Also, having to browse the folders off the lagging touch screen and do play all sucks. Unless somebody knows the way to jump folders off of the steering wheel.

Sync Please say a command: "Play Artist X"
Sync Please say a command: "Play Song X"
Sync Please say a command: "Play All"

Pretty much everything you are complaining about can be accomplished without even touching the infotainment stack.

 

[uglygun]

Sync Please say a command: "Play Artist X"
Sync Please say a command: "Play Song X"
Sync Please say a command: "Play All"

Pretty much everything you are complaining about can be accomplished without even touching the infotainment stack.

That isnt what I am talking about.

Doesnt work when you have a folder that contains 80s music with about 60+ files. With multiple artists through out the folder you wind up with them thrown completely out of order due to the song title.

The craptastic structure for "play all" can smear an artist with 3 songs all through out the damn folder because the thing is focusing on song title.

I am not doing "play song" after every goddamn song. But then sync is shit and I dont talk to my car or need/want bluetooth nor GPS.

The audio sucks and the general navigation/hud sucks.

 

[sauerkraut]

That isnt what I am talking about.

Doesnt work when you have a folder that contains 80s music with about 60+ files. With multiple artists through out the folder you wind up with them thrown completely out of order due to the song title.

The craptastic structure for "play all" can smear an artist with 3 songs all through out the damn folder because the thing is focusing on song title.

I am not doing "play song" after every goddamn song. But then sync is shit and I dont talk to my car or need/want bluetooth nor GPS.

The audio sucks and the general navigation/hud sucks.

When you tell it to play a specific artist, it doesn't matter where or what folder they are in. If anything, your issue is with tags and that's not the systems fault. Where are you acquiring your music from? If the Id3 tags are that bad might I suggest retagging them with musicbrainz Picard.

Sent from my HTC6525LVW using Tapatalk

 

[uglygun]

When you tell it to play a specific artist, it doesn't matter where or what folder they are in. If anything, your issue is with tags and that's not the systems fault. Where are you acquiring your music from? If the Id3 tags are that bad might I suggest retagging them with musicbrainz Picard.

Sent from my HTC6525LVW using Tapatalk

The thing you are missing is I dont want to play just one artist. Whether it is scattered through multiple files or not. I want my 80s folder to play the same order in my 2015 as it plays in my 3 other vehicles.

If I say "bangles" then I have to say something else after those token 3 or 4 songs. Then again after 2 more songs, and again. As opposed to in 3 other cars where I can simply play the damn folder as one continuous play list and artists are automatically together alphabetically. Dont want to listen to a specific song or artist, I hit a button once or twice and keep on going.

It really is less convoluted and much simpler than the crap I deal with in the 2015. Talking to a car is overrated.

I get that some of you think it is the most convenient thing in the world. But it works like shit compared to what amounts to nearly 15 years of how I am used to using digital media and files.

Buttons to quickly scroll up a folder and down a folder would help alleviate a lot of the problem. Being able to arrange files based on artist name or track name would be nice as well.

Basically to find something semi-workable I have around 8 gigs of music to retitle so I can cure my car's stupidity.


But this is off topic. The sound quality of the car's audio is shit.

 

[sauerkraut]

Basically to find something semi-workable I have around 8 gigs of music to retitle so I can cure my car's stupidity.

There is some good news here, musicbrainz will do about 99% of that work for you. It's a great program for correcting bogus tags and not having to do them manually. Trust me, I re-tagged my 100GB+ music collection in one evening with that awesome program.

I get that you are agitated by the infotainment system, it's not the best out there (hell, I'm pretty sure it worked better in my 2013 Fusion, which I don't quite understand). Based on your last response, why don't you just hit play all and shuffle? Then you can just hit next if a track comes on that you want to skip. It's what I do since I have so much music on my USB Drive. I don't know what else to tell you. :shrug:

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