Sound quality on Google Home sounds like low bitrate MP3 (Premium subscription)

[wrongpete]

Plan: Premium (Family)

Country: UK

Device: Google Home

My Question or Issue

Over the past couple of weeks the sound quality through my Google Home and Google Home Mini have been terrible. Everything sounds like really low bitrate MP3 at high compression settings. My internet connection is >20Meg and playing from Google Play on the same devices sounds great. Are there settings for this? Is it a network issue? How do I fix it?

[hoffmanjoshua]

Go into your settings and find "Normalize Volume." Turn the slider to the off state. This should help with the sound quality.

JasonLNoel's photo should help if you cannot find the setting.

Let me know how it goes 🙂

[wrongpete]

Thanks Joshua, but I don't think this works as the music is streaming totally independently of my phone and PC. It's all on voice command through Google Home.

I know where to find the normalise setting in the Spotify Desktop and Mobile apps but where do I do this for Google Home? There seems to be only the option to choose which services are linked. 🤔

[wrongpete]

Additionally if I open the Spotify app on my phone while playing through Google Home various options are temporarily disabled, including normalise. Presumably as the app is only acting as a remote control in this state.

[jrpom]

I’ve noticed this too, and it has nothing to do with settings or platform. It was not this way when I first got my google home and suddenly started in the late spring. Everything has that great underwater low bitrate sound, I’d like to see this get a bit more attention. Seems like a change on either google or Spotify’s end, but it needs to be fixed.

[Uings]

This has been bugging me for a while.

Audio was much better when I brought the Google home. It is now much worse.

[b14ck7hund3r]

Sound quality is terrible for me too. When I bought my Google Home the sound was quite good. Now it's just "compressed noise". It's really annoying. I already sent feedback to Google but nothing changed in months

[hurley182guy]

Have the same issue.
It's almost like a cache in the cloud needs to be cleared or something.

For example I have one song that plays in low bitrate bad quality and it always gets a minute from the end and then it skips to the next track.

It used to play fine all the way through, but now that it once skipped with 1 minute to go it does it everytime (on top of playing in low bitrate too)

It ends with a minute to go no matter what device I play it on GH or GH mini.

Emptying the cache on the Spotify mobile app would have no benefit i'm assuming.
Have unlinked and relinked spotify account to google assistant.

[el_grillo]

Agreed, it's **bleep**ing awful quality. I just noticed it as well. Spotify probably downgrading the stream quality to save themselves some server bandwidth, assuming most people won't notice (and can't do anything about it)? **bleep**ing scummy as **bleep**.

[DanSmalley]

Me too.

Turning off normalisation actually fixed it a couple of weeks ago but it's started doing it again despite normalisation being off on my phone, both tablets, and on my PC.

[bleydon]

This is awful. Sounds like a bad 128 MP3...better sound from a €30 Bluetooth speaker.

Just bought my first Google Home speaker and wondering if I made a mistake and should have gone with Echo :-(((

Hoping it's something that can be fixed