pfgray2008

It's been awhile since I purchased a SD card; can anyone save me the time and frustration and tell me which of these Scandisk 32GB cards are combatable with my obsolete MMI 2016 SQ5? I'm not sure what the MMI system can handle in terms of formats write & read speeds etc.


https://www.sandisk.com/home/memory-cards

nate704

I have this and it's working just fine with music and video files with 2016 MMI.

ex-quattro PETE

Pretty much any 32GB SD card will work in your MMI.

Don't worry about read speed. But the higher the write speed, the quicker you'll be able to copy media from your computer to the SD card.

asmi84

But unless you like to refresh your car audio library every day, I wouldn't worry about that too much. I've bought the cheapest 32GB card I could find in local Walmart for like 20$, uploaded my audio collection to it and called it a day.
It really sucks that MMI doesn't support lossless formats though, so the only way to actually enjoy high quality sound system that we've got seems to be burning audio CD/DVDs, or using external player that can play lossless files through AUX IN. I personally don't care for the quality enough to bother with that, but I still don't understand why car makers put high quality audio systems without any reasonable means of actually enjoying said high quality sound...

ex-quattro PETE

Let's face it, due to all the ambient noise, car/mobile audio environment is far from ideal audiophile listening setting, and most people are not able tell the difference between a high bitrate MP3/MP4 and lossless anyway, even though some think they can.

Although yes, for a manufacturer it seems that it should be fairly easy to add lossless support, especially if they use free formats that don't require them to pay any licensing fees/royalties. Does anyone know if the newer MMI systems (like in the A3) support lossless?

Redd

"but I still don't understand why car makers put high quality audio systems without any reasonable means of actually enjoying said high quality sound... "
One word: PROFIT.

First, look at the demographics. Audi is a luxury marque, that usually means an older customer base. By the time the average customer is 40 (and by the time the average customer is only 25, if they'd been to lots of live concerts or places with live DJs) they're hearing is destroyed. Fine an online hearing test, use the best headphones you can find (because phone speakers are crap and most earbuds not much better) and test your hearing.
The average luxury car maker probably can't hear anything above FM quality anyway, true CD or DVD quality is a cruel joke on you as you get older. I used to hear well over 19Khz, past the limits of test equipment, and could hear "ultrasonic" alarm sensors quite clearly. Now? I'm lucky to hear 14kHz, well below FM quality.
So lossless audio, even ignoring background noises? I use it, but the audiologist doesn't lie.

Then there's money again. It costs money when car makers use proprietary equipment (to prevent you from replacing it with a standard double-DIN that is better) and the have to upgrade it. My AMI system only supports SDHD cards (32GB) and those were obsoleted by SDXD over five years before the car was built. The technology specialists at Audi were simply too cheap to keep up with standards, much less to waste money on quality.
They're not alone in that practice. Car makers make a lot more money installing fancy brand names (who often were contracted to build a special product) since 80-90% of their customers can't tell the difference anyhow. If you can find the Philips "Golden Ears" challenge on the web, amuse yourself. Just TRY to complete even the third level.

Lookout57

You can use any size SD card as long as it's formatted as FAT32. I'm using 256GB cards in my Q5 and A7.

ex-quattro PETE

The question is, how much of that 256GB does the Q5 MMI actually recognize? There have been earlier reports that about 80GB is the limit.

Redd

Every operating system (even the "invisible" one in an OEM music player) will also have limits as to:
The file cluster sizes it can read (unusually large cluster sizes being needed to accommodate maximum capacity on the stick)
The number of FOLDERS that can be read on any device, at all levels (sometimes as low as 1,024 or even 512)
The number of FILES in any given folder
The number of files on any given device
And the maximum path length for any file name. If the full path name for your file is "MUSIC/polka/roll out the barrel.mp3" probably anything can read it, but if the full path name exceeds 256 characters, including the "drive" letter, even computer OSes tend to truncate the name or crash on it.

And there's so much of that, that AoA and the dealerships don't have any real clue about. Much less document. (Like, the AMI and MMI systems handling SDxx cards differently from each other.)

Of course Audi is hardly alone in this, even radio makers tend to set inexplicable limits on the media they can accept.

Go123

The 2016 MMI does support lossless FLAC. Incidentally it also supports multi-channel FLAC.

https://www.audiworld.com/forums/s6-.../#post24681394

Additionally, I use 2 256GB SD Cards, without issue.