AUX port with an iPod - distortion?

Easiest thing to do is to re-rip the tracks causing disortion and make sure their dynamic range is the same as the rest of the "good" tracks.. Any good ripping program should have an option or tool for level balancing.. In the mean time, you can try turning *down* the volume on the ipod until the distortion disappears and then turning up the volume on the car..

 

It seems that you know a thing or two about audio, which is good... while i wouldn't encourage piracy on the boards here, it's really hard for us to be able to help out without being able to hear/test the problem ourselves. Perhaps you could post a small list of the songs where you hear this problem (so if anyone has them they can test it on their system through an iPod or CD or something), or maybe even create a short audio sample with some of the frequencies that you have problems with?

basically, we need to come up with some way we can uniformly try to hear what you're hearing in our cars.

 

I get the same thing.
I'm not really impressed with the sound system in the Prius.

 

I noticed a bit of distortion (static sound) on a couple of tracks that I burned from iTunes last night. 3 out of 5 are OK but 2 have distortion. I do not hear it when listening through headphones.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Matt Domenici @ Aug 7 2006, 04:21 PM) [snapback]299254[/snapback]</div>

As an audio guy, I'm curious. I don't own an iPod, so explain to me why the fact that you are using a line-level output means the volume control has no effect. Is it prefader on your iPod?

Also, with respect to the dynamic range issue, are you sure it isn't just the compression of the MP3 limiting the dynamic range?

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Matt Domenici @ Aug 7 2006, 01:10 AM) [snapback]298907[/snapback]</div>

I have my iPod connected using just the headphone jack. I also have the output set to maximum volume. I've never tried connecting through the dock connector, although I was tempted to figure out how to do it.

I did experience distortion problems when I first tried connecting to the AUX port. The distortion sounded almost like clipping or digitalization/packetizing, sometimes the top, bottom or both would be chopped off. Changing the output volume on the iPod did not change the clarity; the problem didn't occur using a normal or mp3 CD, so I knew it wasn't the stereo itself.

I replaced the headphone cable with one from a set of medium-quality Altec Lansing computer speakers and the problem went away. I'd suggest finding a good quality, insulated headphone cable, connect to the headphone jack with the dock connector removed and see if that helps at all - if it does, move forward from there.

Hope that helps!

Kal.