[mlai]

Sound quality depends on a lot of different things, and the source actually plays the most important factor. And from our local F10 gatherings, we have the same conclusion that AUX sounded best, provided that you have a great audio source.....

Put it simply, for CIC systems, the best quality is limited at CD quality, or WMA Lossless at 44.1K/16bit. NBT systems are limited at FLAC 96K/24bit which are HiDef(have not tried 192K/24bit yet....) Both systems MAYBE able to play DVD-Audio, which are higher quality than CD.

However, that's only one part of the equation. If you rip CD into the hard-drive, it will get compressed, most likely to MP3. If you import, the music most likely will just get copied onto the hard-drive.

Most of these compressed music will have to go thru decoding, and internal DAC and this is where it matters a lot! The quality of the DAC of the CIC/NBT units are just not comparable to real HQ DAC units like Astell and Kren AK100 or AK120s. With music stored on AK120, and played via AUX, you will get way better resolution of the sound, provided that you have really high quality music sources (192k/24bit) to take advantage of that. Playing the music via AUX bypassed all those DAC in the BMW audio system, and thus bypassing any audio inefficiencies introduced by the onboard digital system......