2021 Acura TLX Audio Review

[JonUrban]

Just bought a ‘21 TLX A-Spec. I brought a USB with Money converted from DVD by DVD Audio Extractor to WAV to confirm discrete 5.1 playback. The coins moved around! It worked and I loved the car’s looks and ride, so I opened up the wallet. The sound overall is impressive and big. I would say more immersive than my home set up due to the number of speakers and close range. FLAC files were variable - Atom Heart Mother, Echoes worked. No go on Sgt. Pepper’s, Division Bell. These were my first conversions to USB. Used 24 bit/48kHz. 32 GB San Disk Cruiser USB. DAE didn’t have uncompressed option for FLAC but files seemed similar size to WAV ~2GB per album. Wonder if I’m doing something wrong. When converting does it make any difference conversion from DTS vs AAC? Still experimenting with naming files so the tracks play in order rather than alphabetically. Any questions or comments are welcome.

The MOST bus is very particular in what it accepts, so your 24/48 flacs have got to be at zero compression for the car to play them. The conversion is a snap with foobar, which is free. Just open up the files you have, be they wav, flac, 24/96. 16/44, whatever, and set up and save conversion setting to end up with 24/48 flac at zero compression.

The output that you get will play in the car, be it 4.0, 4.1, or 5.1. The only other thing you may have to deal with is the number of channels. If you have quad or 4.1 stuff, it needs to be in a 5.1 file, so the center and lfe channels will have to be empty and present if they are not there.

It's a pain for sure, but once you get it down you won't even think about it

 

[ddahl44]

The MOST bus is very particular in what it accepts, so your 24/48 flacs have got to be at zero compression for the car to play them. The conversion is a snap with foobar, which is free. Just open up the files you have, be they wav, flac, 24/96. 16/44, whatever, and set up and save conversion setting to end up with 24/48 flac at zero compression.

The output that you get will play in the car, be it 4.0, 4.1, or 5.1. The only other thing you may have to deal with is the number of channels. If you have quad or 4.1 stuff, it needs to be in a 5.1 file, so the center and lfe channels will have to be empty and present if they are not there.

It's a pain for sure, but once you get it down you won't even think about it

I don’t think I did anything differently for the FLACs but it was odd how some worked and others didn’t. Sticking with WAV since those are working for now. Any advantage you see WAV vs FLAC for this purpose? And any difference AAC vs DTS as the source? Thanks.

 

[JonUrban]

Wav's work fine, but the car will not display the graphics if you tag the files. If all you care about are the tunes, then sticking with wav is not an issue

 

[Infomas]

You will probably find weirdness in the sorting. Check out freeware SDSorter or DriveSort. They have a few sorting options. I can only speak to the 2015 Acura models, but they just play the files based on when the songs were placed on the USB stick.

I've found that some players don't like certain sample rates. Check your sample rates to see if there is a difference.

You're lucky. The 2015 TLX only supports AAC lossy files. I can still do 5.1 but have to drop to 320kb. Still, with road noise, I'd rather have the loss of some sound then having to continue to carry around 100 or more DTS CDs (which is the only other way to get multi channel into the car).