Why so bad sound quality?

Hey @Fat_Lizzy 

Sorry for a delayed reply, I just came across this thread and it piqued my interest as a fellow budging audiophile.

I haven’t noticed major issues in sound quality when using Spotify Premium. The HiFi service is not launched yet and I don’t know when it will be released. So far the audio is brought to Spotify in lossless codec (flac and wav) and then converted into ogg / aac formats with various bitrates. Highest is 320kbps for ogg and 256 for aac, for more information read this article.
Both of them should be of higher efficiency than mp3.

The Pascal song is of shockingly poor quality. But that’s the case on both Spotify and Bandcamp and as an mp3 file. I don’t hear any huge differences between them.
I feel the biggest differences could be coming from
– what audio quality the client is set to use;
– whether normalization is turned on;
– audio settings of the OS, including things like Dolby and sound enhancers;
– drivers and hardware.

Note: individual songs may sometimes have inferior or downright broken audio for any reason. If you find such songs that don’t sound right, please report them.

For further inspection, I’ve seen users say Spotify’s web player is better (it uses AAC), so feel free to try that one.

Hopefully any of this is of help, have a nice day!

Sebasty

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