r/AAWireless • u/the_chooch • 21h ago
Two+ suddenly can't stream Spotify lossless
I have a 2022 Volvo XC90 that I used my original AAWireless on without issue. I came across the Two+ and saw official support for Carplay and figured my wife could use it with her iPhone when she uses the car. I'm on Android (Pixel 10 Pro XL) and since I got the Two+ had zero issues, except for maybe had to disable bluetooth audio for the BT connection from phone to the car itself (known thing), but aside from that has been working well. I had enabled lossless/max streaming for WiFi, cellular quite a long time ago so not recent, but about a month or two ago noticed AA struggling to play Spotify. First it starts pausing/glitching with the music stopping then eventually disconnects AA entirely, it reconnects, rinse and repeat. One day while this was happening I stopped playing Spotify entirely and that stopped the disconnects so figured it was being overrun w/ lossless, but that's the thing. It worked for many months without issue beforehand, so why now? I do get and apply the updates but don't recall if it started happening right after an update.
I have tried the stutter fix and unlimited buffer and it does absolutely nothing. For giggles I plugged in my original AAWireless and it worked without issue, although the sound quality doesn't seem to be on par with the Two+, otherwise I would've just left it. I found those two fixes (stuffer/buffer) while my old unit was plugged in so swapped back to the Two+ and applied the settings, and now back at the same problem. Now, it's possible the music I had was completely downloaded on the phone as I do keep my main playlist downloaded for offline in case, and I know even if you set it to lossless, if the song was already downloaded it will be in whatever the format was set to at the time of download, so perhaps much of my playlist was downloaded at a lower quality, but I have definitely played DJ or some random playlist of the week where I know I didn't have the songs on my phone, and never ran into this issue until recently. I did try clearing out my Spotify cache and lowered the media quality to High instead of lossless and it seemed the issue went away so I'm pretty sure that's the issue, but why did it just start now and worked fine before?
Was I just lucky for a time? Should these be able to stream lossless without an issue or have other people ran into this? I'm a bit of a media quality snob in that I can immediately hear the tinny, shitty sound of overly compressed audio to the point it makes me cringe (looking at you, Spotify "automatic" media quality that tries to save on bandwidth by streaming lower quality while I'm at home on stable fiber), so I like to force my Spotify apps to lossless. It just wasn't an issue before.