My "new" take on the JBL system ...

[SweetDave]

The volume much beyond 25 is loud enough, even with gusting winds at highway speed. 42? get your ears checked!

I did some auditioning of different sources. Carplay, built in Apple music connection, FM Radio, and SiriusXM Radio. This list indicates the best sounding to the absolute worst, in that order.

Bottom line: if you want the best audio quality from your Tacoma use Apple Carplay or Android auto at at least 256 kbps lossy or apple lossless.

With the road noise, etc environment of a vehicle 256 kbps lossy compression is just fine. Many (not all) users with a good set of headphones cannot A/B sample blind tell the difference. Given this isn't a super premium system, it's a JBL, not a B&O, B&W, etc system, I just use the Apple standard 256 kbps AAC on the go.

I was also surprised how bad the Apple Music connection with the truck (not using carplay) sounded. Listened to the same song on both sources and it was night and day. So don't pay extra for that subscription!

Sirius / XM Rant:
Back before the merger, there was Sirius and XM radio, which later merged into one. Post merger, which was mostly XM being absorbed into Sirius, the service became terrible sounding. There were a number of reasons.

Without diving too much into the technical details:

• XM prioritized quality of audio over quantity of channels

• XM had a few 128 kbps (great for 2005) AAC channels (that's what apple sold in 2005)
• XM also had a couple of 5.1 surround sound channels (XM pops)

• At the cost of channel changing speed, XM used 2 completely separate satellite carrier frequencies offset by 4 seconds, allowing the receiver to maintain a large buffer and they also used FEC (forward error correction) to prevent the audio psychoacoustic artifacts (aka R2D2 sound).
• In addition to the satellite transmitters, XM had an extensive terrestrial repeater network.

Thus, XM radio had a far superior codec, 3 chanel signal diversity, forward error correction and allocated more bandwidth per channel. Then along came the merger...

However because 'Murcia where more is better than quality, we're stuck with Sirius which chose to offer more channels at lower quality, worse codecs using awful technology. The outcome is less than AM radio quality sound and terrible lock-in business practices and a terrible royalty to artists.

One exception: if a car (not tacoma) has the 360L service, XM radio stations "tune" via the car's built in LTE/5G modem; it uses the satellite signal as a backup if cellular is unavailable. Best I can tell this is somewhere between 128-256 kbps MP3. When the system uses the cellular, it sounds decent.

Question: Did you directly pipe in music and if so, how? I placed some MP3 files on a stick and plugged it in, I could not play them. I guess I could ... RTFM lol.

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