Flat sound, no bass > swap center&subwoofer

naroslife — Wed, 10 Jan 2018 18:25:54 GMT

Hi!

So I've been struggling with audio quality for more than a year now. The main problem is that on a 5.1 system the audio sounds flat, lacking bass and the rear speakers are not used, even though speaker fill is turned on in the Realtek driver.

In the last months, years, feels like ages I tried various things and found a not really optimal solution. I'll list these and I'll also post a few suggestions for Spotify, because their player is really VERY VERY lacking basic functionality.

I had this problem both in the Web Player in Chrome and Firefox and the Windows app (never tried the one from the Store) but not in Microsoft Edge. I tried several "hacks" with Flash in Chrome and Firefox but nothing helped. My guess is Edge used a different, legacy version of Flash and after Spotify became incompatible with Flash it didn't work either. The HTML5 player also has flat sound.
--force-wave-audio, --try-supported-channel-layouts and --disable-audio-resampler: one or multiple of these I think just made my rear speakers play a little bit of sound, it was very quiet, and the sound stayed flat though.
Swapping the Center/Subwoofer outputs made Spotify sound way better, but messed other things up (no wonder).

So I suggest you add an option to swap these outputs in the app, so I don't have to switch it everytime I want to use your service, or even better would be to add much needed freedom in various aspects of the player:

Output mode: DirectSound, ASIO, WASAPI (DirectSound works best in my setup with a 5.1 system)
Output device selection
In app upmixing to 5.1
If you're not willing to add these basic functionalities just let other players like MusicBee or foobar connect to the service via an API. It should be a part of the Premium subscription.

All in all it is really frustrating that I can't get bearable sound quality out of a service I'm paying for. It drives away people who listen to on anything other than a 2.0 system or headphones.

topic Flat sound, no bass > swap center&subwoofer in Desktop (Windows)

Flat sound, no bass > swap center&subwoofer