Bad sound quality

[fh19320]

Plan

Premium

Country

Poland

Device

Desktop

Operating System

Fedora Linux 35

My Question or Issue

I did several encodes of CDs to my Vorbis using oggenc and every time using proper blind test I can point to my encode as very much higher quality.

I have premium and I have selected Very High quality. And also disabled Normalization. I checked several albums and all had the same issues on Spotify.

I have DAC from 2004 and $25 headphones so it's not really something inaudible for most.

Then I did other encodes, like FDK AAC, LAME MP3 and testes FLAC. They were all very good, only Spotify encodes of the same material are much worse (I made myself sure that the source is the same). Everything was encoded 320kbps CBR with default options.

They lack stereo, airness and have missing frequencies. There is much worse surround.

Can someone explain to me the reason for this. Does Spotify preprocess music. Do they use the same oggenc or something else? Do they reencode material with the latest codec?

[Sebasty · Accepted solution]

Hey @fh19320 

I suggest you try running Spotify using this command:

spotify --log-file=spotify.log --trace-file=spotify.trace

Then play some music, and you should also see the log file that's created in your home directory. This should tell what quality Spotify actually streams.

It may be that the setting the client is showing you in your preferences is not correct.

That's what the log file says about my session:

I have no audio issues.

🙂