Is the Amazon music stream degraded by Bluetooth?

[Kyle76]

In other words, do you get a better music quality with a wired connection to speakers or is the signal quality such that sending it to the speakers via Bluetooth isn't going to make any difference.

[DParker]

In other words, do you get a better music quality with a wired connection to speakers or is the signal quality such that sending it to the speakers via Bluetooth isn't going to make any difference.

Degradation in audio signal fidelity is inherent and unavoidable with any data transmission method that uses lossy compression techniques, Bluetooth included.  The real question is: Can you tell the difference?  The answer to that depends on too many variables for a single blanket answer.

[mike27oct]

Look at it this way:
If you need portability, that's when to use BT.  If you want best fidelity to your quality stereo, pipe the Dot's audio output into the high level inputs of the stereo amp and its connected speakers.  BT is intended and built for portability and convenience, although the full frequency range for a quality sound system is less than with a good wired device.  Anyway, the sound from good BT equipment is more than adequate for portable speakers which come in all ranges of sound quality.  Let your ears decide which is best for the equipment and situation.

[Snafs]

However, we are ignoring the GIANT Elephant in the room here, which is really annoying.

You use a Bluetooth speaker.
The speaker is turned off, then you can ask the Echo to pair to Bluetooth, it will search, find the speaker and flip it's audio from it's only little internal speaker to your Bluetooth one.
That's Great
If you don't wish to use your Bluetooth speaker all the time, all during the night, when you are work etc, you turn is off and the Dot reverts to it's own internal speaker again.
That's Great

However, and this is where the large Elephant makes its appearance.

You use a wired connection for better sound quality and the second you physically insert the jack plug into the Dot, it's speaker is killed dead, and will stay dead, irrespective of your Amp/Speaker, until you physically pull the jack plug back out of the Dot.

Major pain/fail from a usability/practicality standpoint.

What they SHOULD have done ideally is to not kill the internal speaker, but allow a voice command to either use internal speaker, or use external speaker.

They have done it the cheap way that little radios etc have used for decades, the physical bending of pins in the socket, kills the built in speaker.

Shame as it really makes using a wired connection much more of an issue.

[Kyle76]

I have tried both wired and Bluetooth in my office, where I'm mostly playing background music on a pair of pretty nice powered speakers, Audioengine 5's.  There's not a lot of difference, so I'm using Bluetooth.  There are a couple of advantages.  First, I can keep the Dot within reach on my desk to manually control volume, which is handy.  Also, with a wired connection, I find that Alexa does not completely mute the music when taking a command; so it can be hard to hear responses.  That seems like a really silly way for things to work.  Of course, I could tell Alexa to stop playing music and then give the command, but that defeats the simplicity of the setup.  What I would really like, as I've mentioned in another thread, is the ability to equalize the music.  I hope this will be added to the app at some point.