[bluewater328]

I think the point is here that the aux is a weak point of the equation. There are dozens of different adapters specifically made for BMW applications that utilize the stock Aux/USB combo, and functionally they work well. I have a Tune2air, for example, that does well by me as far as steering wheel controls and the abolity to stream via bluetooth - as well as maintain and juggle between my stock bluetooth phone pairing.

The crux of this sort of quest lies in the DAC at the point the digital signal is converted. For me, regardless of the conveniece, the weak point is that the Tune2Air does the digital to analog conversion and out through the AUX but then gets reprocessed again going through the headunit. His solution seeks to maintain a pure digital signal until the headunit for a single DAC conversion, which is ideal if you believe the headunit DAC is worth its snuff (and you’d go through it any way).

Once I get off my butt and install everything, I’ll have an option of doing the same thing via my VX800/8i as a secondary source bypassing the headunit. However that comes at a cost of headunit display information. So everything has a sacrifice.

You could even argue that a Bluetooth adapter itself is a point of sacrifice since A2DP is inheritly lossy (significantly less than the potential quality of directly playing a CD in irder to maintain a strady transmission). ATPX codec aims to resolve most (read not all) of that, but you have to make sure you find a bluetooth receiver that supports that (as well as a streaming device).

So to me you’re both right and wrong and just seeking different levels of audio fidelity with each making their own justified sacrifice.

But as it included figuring out the VO coding that would work, I think this is a great write up with a great solution vs the Mobridge/Densions of the world.