Spotiy Premium audio quality - pretty disappointed

[Choiglia]

Just signed up for Spotify Premium after reading that the premium service streams high quality audio.  Did two quick quality comparisons, and so far I am pretty disappointed.

First I played a local audio file using Spotify.  I had ripped the file from a CD in iTunes... don't remember the settings, but they were high.  Sounded great.  Then I searched for the same song on Spotify and streamed it.... sounded significantly worse.

Then I played another local audio file using Spotify.  This file was not ripped from a CD.  It was downloaded from iTunes.  Sounded good.  Again searched for the same song on Spotify and streamed it.... again really disappointed by the Spotify streamed version.  Noticeably worse.

High Quality Streaming is checked on in my preferences.  Am I missing something?  Is the streaming quality just inferior?

Anyone else experience similar results?

[adisib]

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@Peter wrote:
You do mention an interesting point, are there any big streaming companies (with comparable catalogue size to Spotify) that stream lossless?

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The most well known is probably Quobuz, with 14 million songs (in March 2014) compared with Spotify's advertised 20 million.

[lauma78p]

Hi,

Although I have had a Pandora account (unused for most of 2014) and have known about Spotify on mobile from a very good friend, I am a very lazy, very new and happy convert to Spotify (on Mac). I have no problems with the sound quality overall EXCEPT for when I listen to ONE album from ONE Artists' group. All the tracks I have tried sound like they're on a bouncing CD!. ABSOLUTELY NO PROBS with tracks from other albums by this Artist or Any Other Artist.

Please don't suggest I reinstall - as I said earlier, I am so lazy. Thanks for any help.

[user-removed]

Hello: Can you copy and paste the album link and post it here? Right click on album art and select http link to copy, come back here and paste the link in a message. Thanks. This is so another user can confirm and make sure this is not an app cache issue or something.

[lauma78p]

Hello Jay, Thanks for this follow up. Here's the http link:Musical Island Boys – Musical Island Boys.

[user-removed]

Hey there.

Award winning artist here.

The first track of album (in Finland) sounds great, but other random scratching. It's not my music really, so I have not listened full album. This is most likely broken record, I have reported this album to Spotify.

I'm changing now back to my playlist. As I need techno, techno!

If you want some amazing tunes, just tune in to this track, and you'll receive Call from Babylon soon 😉 Accept this call! Ha 😎

And one more. Please enjoy your day!!!

Greetz 😉

[Cahleo]

I just upgraded to premium today. Have cleared my cache and reinstalled and set to high quality.

Sounds no different at all, completely the same. I've tried loads of tracks in my playlists and some from the current top lists.

Obviously I'm not alone here -- will this ever be looked into? Is premium just a sham?

[hyyyperlink]

Same here. Extreme setting is never comparable to 320 mp3 file – even 256 AAC from iTunes sounds so much better. You can heear the difference. It is so disappointing!!

[mindfuse]

I synchronized my iPhone in Premium mode at the High Quality (not extreme) setting thinking I might enjoy good quality in my car (DynAudio system). Sadly, and I can verify this listening Spotify on my iPhone using Headphones, the music sounds as if it suffers from overdrive (input volume too high). I tried to change the volume on my phone the result is equal, it really is the music. Lots of compression in the highs and lows. I listen to DAB radio and my car's sub punches out clean and punchy bass lines, but coming from Spotify it's more often than not terrible to listen to. I have thus cancelled my subscription.

[RV22]

Qobuz looks nice but

a) no available in my country - sorry 😞

b) 5x more expensive than SPOTIFY (6 EUR vs 27 EUR)

the beauty of SPOTIFY is that its enormous & cheap... its a pitty that the sound is also cheap 😞

if spotify tells the truth that they get all material from labels in loseless than i dont know what shi#y encoders are they using... 320kbps MP3 encoded using LAME or Fraunhoffer doesnt sound that bad as SPOTIFY "HIGH QUALITY" sound...

in fact i must really try to notice CD vs 320 MP3 (encoded with LAME or FRAUNHOFER) on most desktop speakers... you can hear the difference on Sennheiser HD650 with dedicated headphone amp...

but SPOTIFY HQ just sounds bad on everything... its muffled, without spark, lifeless... like playing behind a duvet

many guys in this forum can compare to other payed streaming services (ITUNES) and the bitrate declared by SPOTIFY just doesnt fit with the sound we are getting... this is not how 320kbps sound...

[cosmicheretic]

I just double blind A-B'd my flac rip of Allan Parsons track 'Eye in the Sky' with Spotify's and my Dad picked the Spotify version as sounding better.  Both tracks were through my steinberg ur22 usb audio interface dac and headphones.  Spotify sound quality is fine for what I've heard so far.  I'm more concerned about the gaps in catalogues albums/artists personally.  Some artists have only one out of several albums available. This makes no sense to me.  Why not all or none?

[S3ndG]

Hello,

I have read this post and changed some settings like hardware acceleration and equal volume and I don't hear real difference in high quality mode. It doesn't sounds like 320 kbps ...

Now in July 2016, is there a way to improve streaming quality of spotify desktop quality?

thanks 🙂

[Jennyv]

I've been having bad experiences using Spotify Premium. First, the app didn't function properly. Songs played without selecting them and it wasn't only on my phone, but in my friends phone too.
Also, I have a travel playlist which is about a hundred something of songs. This week, the playlist turned out to bee about two hundred something of songs. The last ones in the playlist got repeated. How is this possible, paying for something supposed to be of quality??

[met580]

Spotify we are all not children who stream music from your servers

I would like to have more control over type of file and bit-rate of tunes that I want to listen too

Deezer stream hi def audio files why cant you !!!!!!!

Going to exsperiment start of next month

Mission

[user-removed]

Same problem here.

When activating Spotify Premium quality I can see the size of files in cache ((...)/LocalCache/Spotify/Data) is indeed doubling (~5MB -> ~10Mb) but the sound quality DOESN'T CHANGE AT ALL. Sound quality is pure **bleep** with Windows Spotify app.

With Android app or with Bose Soundtouch the high quality sound is really in high quality yet. So, where is the problem? Spotify's developpers just seem to boycott Windows!? Just absurd. And it seems the problem exists since years and has never been fixed.

[fidelitycastro]

something is off about this 320kbps, the compression sounds unusual, I have been using tidal for ages now but cancelled because it didn't have certain songs I like, I've found out now Spotify is missing them too so it's a licensing problem sadly, but straight away i noticed a sound difference between tidal at 320 and spotifys 320.

PLEASE OFFER CD QUALITY OPTION LIKE 1162KBPS FOR A FEW BUCKS MORE BUT NOT AS CRAZY HIGH AS TIDAL IF POSSIBLE AND PLEASE SOURCE FROM MASTERS.

[ajbroome1]

The discussions I see about sound quaity are mostly from 10+ yrs ago.  Why can't spotify off the Hi Def sound other streaming services have like Tidal?