My 2008 Mini has the standard audio system, was a crushing letdown from the Range Rover I traded in for it but accepted it as it is. Did not even hack into the wiring to change the high pass filter and the front back balance. Never was going to have much bass anyway or - so I thought!

I just bought the new Sony Xperia phone Z3v which rumors had been around stating it had excellent audio qualities as befit a traditional Sony product. This is not a common cell phone in the US and the "v" variant version I have is brand new on Verizon so there is not much in the reviews about this. Plugged it in the dash audio port, fired up Pandora One, (the paid version) and now I am blown away by my sound system. It appears to override the bass filter and really sets the car rocking.

Just my two cents, I am amazed by how rich this sounds now. Going to have to drop some of my flac files onto the 200Gb SD storage card soon.

 

With all due respect, it is not at all possible for an auxiliary audio device to override the filter settings of a receiver. Honestly, if it weren't for you having 450 posts under your belt, i would have mistaken this post for a paid brand promotion. Perhaps what you are really experiencing is simply a different internal EQ setting than you are used to coming from your new device. But seriously, I frequent various tech blogs and the wording of this post has shocking similarities to the many corporate sponsored user comments that attempt to boost a particular product's rep...

 

Ha, that's funny. I don't know how else to explain the effect that I now hear - the bass is definitely much stronger and comes primarily from the rear. I have popped in a CD of the same song from Pandora immediately afterwards and the sound is much richer coming out of my phone. More full of texture sounds and definitely drops the bass.

Is there an explanation for this? On my vintage home stereo setup I have a button named " SOURCE DIRECT ", which bypassess ( overrides ) the receiver settings for tone,bass, etc and instead relies upon the EQ of the source - in my case a Windows Server with a top CL sound card using VLC player on high sample rate FLAC recordings with tweaked EQ settings. The software EQ is incredibly detailed in the amount of frequency filter control it can leverage, and is very noticeable.

Could the car stereo be doing the same type of pass through from my phone? As a test this evening I will try my girlfriends phone on it, some kind of iphone.

however this is working, I am happy as heck with the situation!

 

If I had to guess, I'd say your phone probably has a very "tent post-y" EQ setting built into the software to artificially create separation between the lows mids and highs, as a way to "trick" the listener into hearing a higher fidelity output. I used to do this with my EQ if I was listening through poor quality headphones or speakers to ease the muddiness inherent to a flat frequency response and cheap speakers. There is no setting in the MINI head unit to bypass its native frequency output, other than simply setting the bass and treble to 0, and there is no way for an auxiliary connection to communicate some sort of override mode to the headunit. It is possible that the MINI head unit could ease up slightly on its native EQ curves, simply based on the input source you choose (when selecting AUX as the mode), but even then, it doesn't disable the option to alter EQ using the music note button while plugged in to AUX so it's unlikely it does anything at all internally.

Something I have noticed when using AUX on mine is that my iPhone's output will be higher/louder when my EQ is set to "flat" than any of the other settings, including the iPhone's EQ set to "off". I've also found this to be the best overall setting in terms of sound quality for what it's worth.

 

Ah, some things are making a bit more sense now. The bass/treble/bal/fader options DO still work on the mini with the AUX active, so those filters are still working. The "tent post-y" explanation from spingq makes sense, that must be what the Sony is doing. I have not found the place where the EQ settings are on my new phone, but I like it exactly as it is.

My girlfriends iphone 5 sounded similar to my Sony, but not quite as rich. In any case, both phones sound better than the CD or the radio, so I am off to being happy with the whole deal anyway!

 

Finally found the details. http://blogs.sonymobile.com/2014/10/...-hi-res-audio/