[WP8] Why is the audio quality so poor? Am I missing something?

[ericbjerstedt]

I've been a Spotify user and premium member for a while. I switched from Android to Windows Phone a while ago and although I love the Windows Phone experience as a whole, Spotify was one of the few things I missed. I reactivated my Spotify premium account as soon as the wp8 app was released. I only mention the above to emphasize how much of an evangelist I've been for Spotify until now.

Issue:

* The audio quality on wp8 is so bad that I feel I must be missing something, but the rest of the app's experience is so well done that I'm pretty sure I'm not.

* Most noticeable issue is lack of bass.

   * Audio quality of local and streaming media on this phone is and has been excellent; the difference in sound quality is noticeable to everyone I've asked.

   * I have stream and sync set to high quality and I've compared it to both premium and non-premium accounts on computers and my wife's Android device. I also remember the audio quality on my old Android being much, much better (with the same headphones). 

Please tell me there's something simple I'm missing. I really, really want to keep giving you my money, but I just can't pay for the audio quality I'm receiving.

Edit: As a software developer, I'm embarrassed I did not include this.

Device: HTC 8x (HTC HTC6990LVW)

Networks: Verizon 4G LTE, Wifi (experiencing issue on both)

OS version: 8.0.10211.204

App version: 2.0

Core version: 0.6.4.112.gf895e1a1

[gecc01]

I have been using spotify on my iPhone and iPad with great success. On my Samsung note 2 the sound quality was so poor that I couldn't use that phone to listen to my music with. Same thing with my htc 8x. There is so much background noise it ruins the music. Is spotify just working better with apple products or could it be that Samsung and htc suck at audio quality?