I would drive a ZR1 and not bitch about it even if it had a flat piece of aluminum for a dash with a few gauges thrown in.

 

Inside a car is hardly a perfect acoustic environment. Whatever sound quality is lost in an MP3 is negligible compared to the effects of poor acoustics, road noise, engine noise, poor seating position, etc in a car. OTOH, the convenience of being able to carry around THOUSANDS of songs in a box the size of a phone beats the pants off carrying around a multitide of CD cases. Not to mention, switching songs on an ipod is also much safer than thumbing through the aforementioned CD cases looking for the next thing you want to hear.

Sorry old man, but you're way off base here.

 

I do and have been agreeing completely with this sentiment for several years now. It's not just the Vette... it's that GM has been really far behind w/ nav development for years now and GM apologists keep trying to point at onstar's turn by turn directions. BS excuse if you ask me.

The CTS has it down perfectly (though I read edmunds has been having a ton of software glitches with their CTS's nav unit their experience is not alone)... but the Vette is a heavily dated design and cars like the Malibu and G6 don't even offer nav while cars like the Honda civic do. Something's not right there.

 

GM did not design the ZR1 to be a stripper car or strictly purpose-built machine. If it did it would be even more stripped than the Z06, but it's not... it's actually got several more creature comforts than the Z06.
If you have a problem with that take it up with them, but since that was their decision, they could at least do it right. I don't blame them for trying though... they're trying to compete with high end Ferrarris, Lamborghinis, and Porsches that offer just as many creature comforts in their 6 figure cars.


Wow... way to sound like an elitist there. I'm an audiophile myself but I realize that any car, much less a noisy cramped car like a Vette with a fairly limited capability bose sound system isn't the place to really care about the lossy nature of an MP3 file. The difference between a 192kbps MP3 and a lossless audio file is going to be practically imperceptable at 50 mph in a ZR1 for 99.9% of the population. So what's left? The convenience of carrying around a single device in your pocket that contains and organizes 30,000 of your favorite songs. That sure beats carrying several thousand CDs in your ZR1, because, you know, that adds weight... plus it'd be a huge PITA to sort through them all.

 

Polish a t.u.r.d and all you have is a shiney t.u.r.d.....trash in - trash out.

If you start with a p*ss poor sound file and then listen to it in a loud environment, your hearing even less of what it's SUPPOSED to sound like.....but then, if I have a 600+hp SC'd engine, I ain't gonna' be worried about listening to anything but it's "music"....this ain't no commuter car.

I ain't the one who's off base....maybe your kind of buyer should buy the CTS-V.....

 

I still prefer the sound of the engine in a driving experience as opposed to anything else.

I was an audio engineer in a former life. MP3 is popular... so was Ms. Spears...
Mr. Manilow, etc, etc. MP3 is great for avoiding boredom and getting lots of tunes onto a small device.

As for OnStar turn by turn? The Mapquest download capability and ease of use, coupled with constant upgrade to actual road info is a plus, IMHO. I know how to read a map, so nav has never been a big plus for me. I have a laptop and a USB GPS antennae, if I want to use such a rig, and it lightyears cheaper than a dash mounted nav...plus I can carry it to another vehicle if required.

Our Malibu has Turn by Turn. Great ease of use and perfect for a spur of the moment "where is a so and so?" easy answer system. A more complicated routing is simple enough with planning a route with Mapquest ans selecting a dump to OnStar mouse click...

I suppose I just prefer a more organic experience when I plop myself into the driver's seat.

 

This logic works if you were to take a great sound system and feed it a somewhat lossy MP3 file.

However if we consider the general sound quality of the bose sound system and listening environment of the ZR1 to be a 'turd' by nature (and I'm not suggesting this needs improvement, I'm just calling it what it is), then the logic of your statement above actually defeats your own opinion.

If you 'polish' the turd of a 192kbps MP3 file by replacing it with a lossless file, you're actually 'polishing a turd' because you're still playing it through the Vette's sound system. In other words what you're hearing is a polished turd... a lossless file played through a horribly inaccurate sound system.

And while we're at it... we're still under the assumption here that the aux jack can only be used to play MP3s. That's an incorrect assumption since there are lossless formats that play on most "MP3 players" out there as well. So if the person really cares and can tell the difference in quality, they only have to load lossless sound files on their players instead, and then they still need that aux jack don't they?


You'd never play the radio or a CD in the car if you owned a ZR1? I doubt that. But regardless, you're in the extreme minority there... and since GM is building this car to sell to the entire planet, not just Doug Harden, the thought process is not what Doug Harden would do, it's what the average consumer would like to be able to do... and that includes listening to songs on their portable music player.... those shameless non audiophile bastards.

Since you have such the golden ear, I'd like to challenge you to tell me which of these is a lossless file and which one has been compressed to 320kbps MP3.

And as an added bonus you don't even have to use a ZR1's sound system while it's driving down the road... you can play this on your studio speakers.

www.threxx.com/A.wav
www.threxx.com/B.wav

Even if you can tell the difference (or guess lucky), you surely have to admit it's not a massive one, and it's not one you'd be able to discern in a ZR1 while driving, much less the rest of the non audiophile population.

 

When your going bankrupt you gotta cut costs somewhere.

 

Convenience rules when it comes to media delivery systems. Vinyl is dead as a medium. On this I hope we can agree.

The notion of soundstaging is not really taken into consideration by the engineers who mix or master music media in this era. With some relative good reason due to the ability to approach that dimensionality through quality algorythms contained in good studio reverb devices.

With rare exception, recorded media is done with close microphone placement. Even more isolating direct input to the recording console and digital manipulation of analogue to digital modeling of guitar amp sims have been adopted. It's all based on expedient recording and saving hours and hours to acheive great sound capture. Music compilations are business cases. No difference at all from any other business case. IOW, how much cost to produce compared to hitting a profit return.

Digital methods are just a cheaper method which allows more consistantly acceptible, and thus, pleasant results. Thus, minimize the costs to get to return on investment scenario.

Digital media has many plus factors in it's favor. Analogue and tubes still have the dimension depth characteristics and warm realism which can not be matched up to this point.

Let's not confuse convenience with quality. Mp3's are borderline acceptible, not remarkable.

 

so you have road noise from the runflats, the engine noise, noise from other cars due to very little insulation, various squeaks and rattles, and the infamous quality of the stock BOSE setup... and we're concerned about the loss between lossless and mp3?

surely you cannot be serious

 

I know, right? 10 years ago i didn't even have a CD player in my car. You wanna compare signal to noise ratio of a cassette vs. compression loss of an mp3 and guess which sounds better?

 

I noticed when I put the Crower 296H cam in my Firebird, it was perceptibly louder than the Crane 280H. Does that mean I can join the pointless debate amongst the audiophiles?

With that said, NAV is for my Mother, and my Grandmother...oh yeah, and my wife....and all my ex-g/f's...and my sisters....and.....old douchebags with popped collars and gold chains I guess...and I suppose my one lazy buddy that had his cell phone surgically attached to his hand so someone else can do everything for him in life.

 

Somebody needed to say it.

 

You're being too easy on him. You need to give him 10 choices since his ears are supposedly so well tuned it shouldn't be much of problem for him to tell the difference. 50/50 is better odds than paper, rock, scissors for pete's sake. I want to be impressed.

 

The stereo in my 95 Z/28 broke over a year ago, and I still have yet to replace it.