Sound quality?

[rich01]

I read that 99% of all material is encoded in 320kpbs. But why is the sound quality of a lot of songs so terrible? Just one example: Emeli Sandé – My Kind of Love

It sounds destroyed, especially after 45s! Where do they get their material from before they encode it? What is going on here?

[Old_Guy]

Is there any difference in sound quality between Unlimited and premium subscriptions ?

[Joe]

Hi. You can stream music at up to 320 kbps with Premium and only up to 160 kbps on ultimate.

[Old_Guy]

Hi Joe,

Thanks for your help mate. How do I ensure that I am getting 320 kbps ? Do I have to specify this or is it automatic ? (It seems we have to press a button for everything these days. There was a time when the only button you had to press was a door bell.)

[wibin]

You can choose high quality sound separately. Almost all songs have the high quality version and it will play automatically.

However, this will have no impact on the sound quality issues mentioned in this thread. It still sounds crap.

[Joe]

Yes the settings/preferences for the application have a quality setting you can adjust. I'm really happy with the playback quality I get on both my laptop and android. 

@wibin is there something I can help you with?

[wibin]

---

@jwylot wrote:

@wibin is there something I can help you with?

---

Thanks, but I'm generally happy, especially now that the mobile applications are getting better and better. All services have their own problems. 

But something has gone with the sound processing when converting to compressed format. A digital cracling sound as if the input volume was cranked too high as stated in this thread. A major problem but affects only a small number of albums, and a problem that is limited to Spotify (eg. the youtube version of the song plays perfect).

I have no idea why this happens with some albums but not with others. I just hope that Spotify would put more effort on quality control and at some point go through old conversion and do it right.

Cheers,

Wibin

[Joe]

No worries. If it happens consistently on a few tracks, you can use this contact form to report the issue. Or even start a new thread in the Music Chat section to list these and maybe we can get someone from the spotify staff to take a look from time to time. If music is broken, I'm sure they'd want to fix it 🙂

[zeShade]

just my two cents...

i listened to the track on spotify standard quality and found the crackling sound very annoying.

i tried to listen to the same track using another online site (not sure if it'll be removed but i'll mention it here: deezer) which happens to provide a version compressed differently (not sure if the quality is higher or lower) but what sounded like unwanted crackling sound actually sounds like a slight intentional buzz. as it sounds more naturally produced rather than a problem coming from the recording or playing process, it's a lot less annoying.

so unless someone has the CD and can confirm that this noise is *not* there then all i can say is that it sounds like an intentional sound that for some reason sounds very bad when using spotify standard quality.

note that i'm no expert so the way i describe what i hear is definitely not how a sound engineer would describe these things.

[Joe]

Maybe take this discussion over to Music Chat and provide some examples folk can listen to?

[nilshj]

Just got myself som new expencive  hi quality headphones, and suddenly experienced that som of the tracks is in very bad shape. 

Since the files is delivered by the label, Spotify does not have a "sound check" of it before its uploaded. 

SO, why not introduce a "Bad sound quality" for the users? Make it easy for all to follow up and get feedback.

[Peter__]

Hey @nilshj 🙂

As it currently stands, you can report any content errors/issues such as these directly to the Spotify content team using the instructions outlined in this topic and the content team will take it from there and ask for the tracks to be corrected.

Peter

[nilshj]

@Peter

Not very easy or userfriendly. Should have been possible to do it directly on the track or album.
But thanks for the tip.

[okd5673730027]

it is poor quality to me too. i heard the crackles too.