Poor Sound Quality on Windows PC

[sovi1554]

Plan Premium Country New Zealand Device (HP Laptop) Operating System (Windows 10)

Issue

When listening to music on my laptop, the sound quality is terrible on the Spotify app when listeing through headphones. It sounds perfectly fine with the same headphones on my phone, and sometimes the sound quality is fine, but most of the time it sounds washed out and concert hall like. Or how it sounds when you're listening through really bad headphones, kind of distant. 

I've tried changing the music streaming quality back to automatic, turned the normalize volume off as suggested in another forum, I've tried changing the sound settings on my laptop too. Nothing works! please help 

[kashtan1]

Same problem in US.  Premium accoun, latest Windows 10 build, bluetooth headphones.

The sound is clear and fine playing MP3, Skype calls, Zoom, YouTube and only degrades when playing music through Spotify app.  Tried Spotify web player - same problem.   Listening Spotify music on same headphones through iPhone - no problem.  So it appears only affecting Spotify on Windows.

[Klepi]

Hey,

first troubleshoot your speaker output and disable all fck enhancement in setting list.

Josef 

[wardw123]

Thanks for Klepi's tip to look at the sound settings, I found the root cause for me: Windows had two choices for my (one set of) bluetooth headphones. One was being called 'hands-free AG audio' which had AWFUL flat sound (maybe optimized for voice? I dunno.) Instead, I selected the other one (see screenshot), and the sound was great. Not sure why Windows intentionally degrades the audio of headphones in this way (classic Microsoft idiocy...), but that fixed it for me. Go to Sound Settings (Audio > 'change other sound setting', then click the 'Playback' tab that shows all your playback devices, and choose the 'other' headphones one IF you have 2 like I did for the same headset.)