I continue to have an issue with Spotifys audio quality and I think I found the source of the problem in Spotifys mastering process. It would be greatly appreciated if an employee that actually knows the details could give a bit more insight.
About a year ago I noticed a quite audible deterioration in audio quality, mainly on older classical music recordings I listen to. It first sounded like compression artifacts, but since I always had premium and the compression algorithm didn´t change, I was not suspecting lossless compression. Then I tried almost everything to solve: Reinstalling Spotify on my phone and several PCs, changing my phone, using a DAC, not using a DAC, deleting the cache, changing quality settings back and forth, enabling, disabling normalization etc. Nothing helped. On every device I had this issue.
One day I could not stand it any more and canceled my subscription and got Tidal. Here I noticed it: The same recordings I listened to on Spotify were significantly noisier on Tidal but without the "artifacting" I described. So I assume Spotifys processing of the songs includes some sort of (bad) denoising algorithm that introduces artifacts. This explains why songs that were once good now suddenly had that artifacts.
Unfortunately I was not happy with the selection and the lack of remote control ability on Tidal so here I am, but still not satisfied with Spotifys audio quality.
Here is one of many examples (and not an especially bad one):
Dire Straits - Money for nothing in the "original" release:
https://open.spotify.com/track/31DvHUCSioX0JD7B4kZMJ9?si=gJo-0ItxSUGcNJFdobK54A
Notice it is almost noise-free, which the orignal 1985 release was not. Then the guitar and the reverb-effect at about 1:40 sound wobbly and coarse.
Here the properly professional "studio denoised" 20th anniversary edition:
https://open.spotify.com/track/4bO6DljpuAeQh6HS20i0I5?si=VC65vhxWTnu35mNaJw06Aw
Although the level is much higher, there is not more audible noise. And most importantly, the wobbly effect is almost completely absent.
I know that this issue only affects probably 2-3% of the users and you also need at least decent equipment to notice but once you know what to listen to it really starts to bother you. At the moment this really affects my joy of listening to many recordings on Spotify!
If this would be addressed and resolved I would be very grateful,
Thank you.
Edit: This affects all platforms I tried (Android, iOS, Windows) and is not an issue with my equipment, since I tried at least two dozen different combinations of hardware and settings. Unfortunately the other forums were closed so I can only post here.
Here is a very good example. This is not supposed to sound like this. Yes there is noise, but the original CD release which I have sounds MUCH nosier but not wobbly:
https://open.spotify.com/track/2ZYlgOkVIi4prEDBXVdBKE?si=wDRe7o5eR5ehH8Oo6RyHHw
Staff / Moderator/ 2 years ago in Social & Random