Encountering distortion and electrical noise when using the equalizer.

[LILBABEINLA]

Plan

Premium

Country

Device

(Macbook Pro M2 Pro)

Operating System

(macOS Ventura 13.5.2)

My Question or Issue

When using AirPods to listen to music on Spotify's Mac app and adjusting the equalizer for sound effects, I consistently encounter electrical noise and interference in the music, especially at high volumes or when the 'normalize volume' is turned off. Interestingly, on the Spotify iPhone app, no such issues occur, even at high volumes when adjusting the equalizer. Did someone meet the same problem? I’d greatly appreciate it if there is someone who can help me solve this issue.

[Dian]

Hey @LILBABEINLA,

Thanks for posting in the Community.

Let's try covering the basic troubleshooting steps, just in case. Could you start with performing a clean reinstall of the app as described here? Does the issue occur with a different account and a different Mac?

It's also worth resetting the Bluetooth connection or trying a different set of Bluetooth receiving devices.

Let us know how that went.

Cheers!

[tribble]

I can confirm the same experience. I really notice it when playing Norah Joes "Don't Know Why" using the Acoustic, Piano, or Vocal Booster presets. There are spots of distortion throughout the song, including right near the beginning, 11 seconds and 23 seconds into the song.

So now, I just turn off the equalizer entirely. 😞

[tribble]

@Dian given my specific example above, I wonder if you can confirm whether this is a known bug in the MacOS app?

[Joan]

Hi folks,

Thanks for the replies. We tried to reproduce this both on Mac and Windows and the behaviour appears to be the same across both, but the issue seems to be very intermittent and inconsistent. It looks to be more or less based on the specific content - specific recordings seem to have aspects about them that seem distorted and specific equalizer settings appear to exacerbate these aspects. So for now this seems to be expected behaviour that all depends on the recordings of the songs as they are uploaded to Spotify. It might be worth reporting them as broken content. 

Hope this clears things up.

[tribble]

@Joan there isn't really a way to report broken content. And I don't think "I just don't like it" really applies here.

Edit: actually it's worse than that. I can't actually right click on a song to report. The report option only shows up for an artist. And if I follow the prompts through "I just don't like it" it only lets me highlight issues about the artist. Not any specific track. So, while I like to help here. I just can't the tools aren't there.