The Tesla Model 3 audio system is in a word amazing, but it all comes down to what sources you're using
Which is better
The built-in slacker radio streaming service your phone over Bluetooth or a USB thumb drive full of mp3s or a lossless audio files
Well, it depends it's a little complicated. I
Mentioned this in my model 3 review video
But I've been absolutely blown away by the audio system in the model 3 in my other cars
I've had that car manufacturers premium sound system that all sounded above average at best
but none of them could hold a candle to a car that had was decked out with an aftermarket stereo amplifier and speakers and
Would absolutely not come close to a really good home audio setup. Well the model 3 is no slouch
Will an aftermarket system sound better. Of course, if money was no object you could absolutely outdo this system
But Tesla's premium sound system is to say it again
Amazing. The premium audio package includes 15 speakers throughout the cabinet trunk.
There's 7 full range speakers along the front dash, rear doors and above the trunk area.
One passive tweeter in the front, two woofers in the front doors,
two tweeters in the front doors
two high definition speakers above the a-pillars and one subwoofer in the right side of the trunk
You can adjust the balance and tone settings pretty easily and customize Tesla's immersive audio setting which is their in-house version of Dolby audio
It widens the soundstage and gives a surround sound effect
Which I really like the sound of but it's easy to turn off or lower if you prefer the original audio mix only. For such
A great sound system though. I'm surprised by the limited options we have for getting audio into the car.
We essentially have three ways the built-in streaming services, bluetooth from your phone, or a USB Drive plugged into the car
With both Tesla and Apple having declared an all-out war on analog jacks we'll have to just come to terms of that and move on
So how do these options stack up?
In the US we get slacker radio and tune in as our streaming audio options in other countries
You might have Spotify instead of Slacker, which I'll talk about more later. I'd
rank the quality in the feature set of the streaming options for the car well for slacker, which is the default free option,
neither Tesla or Slacker provide documentation on this
But Tesla owners of the Model S and X have commented that the free slacker streaming is capped at 64 kilobits per second
Mp3 streams which is passable for a low volume listening, but at more critical listening levels
You can hear the heavy compression
It was one of the things I noticed when I got in the car right away
Trying to listen to some of my favorite music from slacker was a complete disappointment the audio sounded tinny and garbled at times
Which immediately pushed me away from using Slacker at all.
Now the service offers a large selection of music
But it's nowhere near as large as something like Spotify as twenty million plus songs and the stations are algorithmically generated
Which means you don't have control over which songs come next.
It's a lot like Pandora it slowly learns from your thumb ratings as well as skips for what to play more of and less of
over time.
Slacker strikes me is a service appropriate for the casual listener
that doesn't care too much about the order of music and just wants a certain style and
collection of music that's based on their preferences for background listening.
There is something fun about being surprised by the mystery of what song is going to be coming next one.
One really nice feature in Slacker's corner when it comes to Tesla is being able to use the car's voice control system to start playing a
station based on any artist or song but supported by Slacker.
"Play Daft Punk Discovery."
I have sometimes had Slacker not pull up the exact song I asked for, but it will select another song from that same artist to kickstart
the station. If you create or have a Slacker Plus or Slacker Premium Subscription, you can get a 128 kilobit per second
mp3 stream in the car
The first thing you have to do is log into the Slacker website and go into your account settings to enable high quality audio.
This will allow streams up to 320 kilobits per second, but that max varies depending on the device.
And from what other Tesla S and X owners have stated it's 128 kilobits per second.
Which I do believe after hearing the difference for myself.
The audio quality is definitely better with less audio compression artifacts,
but it still doesn't sound as full as some of the other audio options that are available.
The second step to higher quality slacker audio is to log into the account inside the car.
You'll see the login option when you select streaming for the audio source.
One wrinkle is that you need to have a slacker specific password to log in if you used Facebook or Google
authentication like I did, you technically don't have a Slacker password. To create one
you can use Slacker's forgot password feature
which will email you a reset link
to use and choose a password of your own. As far as the feature set goes for the Slacker paid
subscriptions, you get ad free music unlimited skips and the higher bitrate streaming on all your devices. With the highest tier subscription
you also get offline listening and play on demand. One benefit of logging into your account and Slacker is
that the car shares its preferences and stations across all your devices.
Now TuneIn is a way to listen to one of tens of thousands of radio stations from around the world.
These are all live streams with no user curation available.
So this is the same experience as listening to a radio station over an antenna.
They also have a very large podcast directory
so it makes it very easy to use Tesla's voice system to start streaming one of your favorite
Podcasts the streaming rate and audio quality will vary wildly based on the station because TuneIn doesn't control the audio quality itself
It's just sending you the stream directly from the station that's created it and just like slacker
You can log into your tuning account in the car
Which means you can take advantage of your favorite stations list and podcast subscriptions across devices
Now for Bluetooth capabilities in the car
a very clever user on the Tesla Motor Clubs forum logged the data going between his phone and the car and was able to determine what
formats that it supports it supports baseline SBC and also AAC in both mpeg-2 and mpeg-4 at every conceivable
sampling rate.
It doesn't support Qualcomm's aptX codec which I know will disappoint some people. When you pair an iPhone to your car
it's pairing it at mpeg-2 AAC
stereo at 44.1 kilohertz with a variable bitrate of
256 kilobits per second peak. And that's not too surprising because that's the exact same bitrate that Apple Music streams that on your iPhone if
you're on Android, It's going to vary depending on what manufacturer you have. So as far as the Bluetooth audio is concerned
this is actually pretty good. It's not audiophile quality, but it's better than the streaming options that you get built into the car
You shouldn't hear any noticeable audio compression or artifacts at all, especially when you're driving, but it's still not the best option available for
The best audio quality in the Model 3 you need to use a USB Drive which supports playing WAV mp3 AAC
(think iTunes) and flat files for the highest bit rates and lossless files. Now
I would never argue that the car is the best place to do critical audio listening,
but the Model 3 has an amazing audio system that can benefit from the high bitrate or lossless audio.
The only way to get that though is through the front two USB ports.
If you've never heard of FLAC or losses audio, then I'd probably tell you not to worry about any of this.
This is really for the audiophiles and people who can hear the subtle end
sometimes not so subtle differences between lossless files and a
256 kill bit per second mp3. In a nutshell you get a much wider dynamic range of audio. For instance
Mp3s tend to drop high-end frequencies or quieter frequencies that are masked by louder ones.
Which is a all by design. All compressed formats are dropping data around
frequencies that are most likely to not be missed by the human ear.
These formats are shaping the audio to play into the psychoacoustic effects of the human ear itself.
However, the more compressed the audio the more noticeable those losses become
Something like FLAC and other lossless files like Apple's lossless
keep all the original data, but they pack it in a more efficient method than older formats
like audio CDs for those of us that remember audio CDs or audio tapes or vinyl records
45s 8 tracks.
I'm old.
Where am I? What was I talking about?
"Hello...I'm cold. There are wolves after me." (howling)
If you're interested reading more about the different compression technologies in use today I'll include a link in the description
Getting audio into the car is actually really simple. You just drop all of your music on a FAT32
Formatted USB thumb drive and plug it into the car on a Mac plug in a USB Drive and open Disk Utility
Then select the USB Drive on the list and select format. Be sure to select FAT32 is the formatting option. You can call it
whatever you like.
On windows open up File Explorer and right mouse click on the USB Drive and select format. In
the options make sure to select FAT32 as the file system type. Again name it whatever you'd like.
If you're using iTunes
you can create a playlist of the music that you want to copy over.
When you have all the songs that you want to the playlist
select all which is command a on a Mac or ctrl a on a PC and
drag and drop them over to the USB Drive itself. That's it.
If you have a big enough drive, you could copy your entire music collection over. In your car
you can plug it into one of the two USB ports in the front to avoid losing a charging cable though,
you can buy a cheap USB hub on Amazon.
I'll link to the one I'm using in the description below.
Going that path also makes it easy to add a second USB Drive for the new Tesla dashcam feature.
It's possible to run both dashcam and music off of one USB drive,
but it requires you to split the partition and that's definitely a separate video to explain how to do that.
The car will automatically detect the drive and you'll see a new USB audio source in the music section of the interface.
Select that and the car will allow you to navigate through music by artist album song genre...
There's no playlist support though right now, but you can shuffle the music as it's playing.
So what about other streaming services? Ah...What have you subscribed to a service that's not available on the Tesla Entertainment System itself?
Well, your only option is to use your phone and stream over Bluetooth to the car. That's it. For most services
this will sound just fine because most of them stream between
256 and 320 kilobits per second max anyway. Spotify uses the OGG Vorbis file format, which is a more modern open-source codec like mp3
just better. An OGG Vorbis file will sound better than an mp3 at the same bitrate.
The free version of Spotify streams at 96 kilobits per second by default and caps out at
160. The paid Spotify plan goes all the way to 320 kilobits per second quality,
which is where in theory you might be able to hear Bluetooth audio is compression back down to 256 if that's what it's transmitting at
Now I don't want to get audio files out there all worked up, but the vast majority people will never hear the difference there.
Especially when driving.
Audiophiles...
They'll most likely be able to tell but again. While driving?? I doubt it.
For something like Apple Music
It will sound as good over Bluetooth as it does any other way. In fact
it may sound slightly better than
Spotify in the situation
because Apple music streams at a max of 256 kilobits per second AAC which is a codec that Apple helped to create is the best
sounding lossy audio format. Much like OGG Vorbis sounding better than an mp3 at the same bitrate, AAC sounds slightly better than
OGG Vorbis. Maybe not so much to the casual listener,
but someone with a critical ear they can probably hear the difference between those formats. And no matter what service you use on your phone
You'll be missing out on Tesla's built-in voice control for choosing your music.
You'll need to rely on your device for everything. From my experience
I'm able to use Siri without any issue inside my car just by calling out her name "Hey Siri"
"Play Daft Punk"
"Sure, here's some Daft Punk."
I'm able to start playing a specific track or a playlist from iTunes or Apple Music. I use Overcast as my podcast player of choice
and I'm able to control playback there too with Siri's new Siri Shortcuts on iOS iOS 12 "Hey Siri"
"Overcast play favorites."
"Got it."
You can create custom Siri phrases to play specific playlists or podcasts as well as play pause and skip.
Sadly Spotify still hasn't updated its app to use Siri Shortcuts,
so there's no way to use Siri to control Spotify on an iPhone yet.
If you're an Android user though, you can use Google Assistant to control Spotify.
Once you have something playing on your phone,
you can use your steering wheel controls for skipping forward and backward as well as play and pause.
Now I hesitate to call myself an audiophile, but I have a long history with audio production and engineering. In college
I studied audio design and production as part of my minor and in graduate school
it was a key part of my studies in video and audio production.
When it comes to all the subtle differences in file formats in compression
I'm one of those people that can actually hear the difference in compression artifacts.
And the reason I bring that up is to say that it really doesn't matter for
90% of the people out there driving around in their brand-new Model 3's with that kicking audio system.
You will never be able to tell the difference between a 320 kilobit stream and a 256 kilobit stream
while you're driving. However,
you will be able to tell the difference between Slacker's default 64 kilobit stream and an iPhone bluetooth stream.
Tesla's default infotainment offering is barely adequate from an audio quality standpoint.
Especially when you're considering how much effort they put into the audio hardware that's in the car.
It's kind of perplexing, but I'm assuming it has something to do with the bandwidth of the cars of cellular connection
And I'm trying to save money and keep costs down.
It's disappointing.
Which is why I rely solely on my phone for driving my day to day audio in the car.
Listening to a song off my phone sounds so much better than the same song on the default Slacker account.
It's shocking. Now my recommendation for folks is based on three categories of people out there.
One is the super casual listener you listen to talk radio
or just want music on in the background on occasion and don't do critical listening pretty much at all, especially in the car.
Tesla's default offering is going to be just fine for you.
Second person is the average listener.You listen to a lot of music casually and do some critical listening on occasion.
You should either upgrade to the paid slacker plan or rely on your phone for driving your audio system.
And the third is a critical listener. You're an audiophile and can't stand listen to low-quality mp3s. Heck a
256 kilobyte mp3 still makes you shiver.
Use the USB drive method.
Download all of your favorite losses audio to a thumb drive or an SSD drive that can run off of bus power and
Plug that into the car the difference between a lossless file.
And any of the streaming options is night and day. The audio is full and rich with much more detail.
It's incredible in the car. Now. I know there are more audio streaming options out there than Apple Music and Spotify
There's things like XM Radio, Pandora, Title and more.
But the user experience in the car is going to be very similar to Apple music and Spotify
Until Tesla opens up their computer system to the third parties and I'm hoping they do open up some kind of app store,
we'll all have to rely on our phones to drive those services in our car. If you liked the video,
be sure to give it a thumbs up and comment down below and what streaming services that you use and which Tesla would integrate into
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