Poor Sound Quality with Spotify Premium on Chromecast Audio

[b3ns6z]

I switched from AirPlay via an AirPort Express to a Chromecast Audio, and the audio quality is terrible on the Chromecast. I noticed that the documentation says Spotify natively uses Ogg Vorbis, and Chromecast uses AAC compression. I interpret this as meaning that Spotify is transcoding from Ogg Vorbis to AAC, which would explain the awful audio quality I experienced. Am I correct that transcoding is being used when streaming to Chromecast?

[RobP1]

A long discussion of this topic can be found here: https://www.xaprb.com/blog/spotify-audio-quality/ and the author had the same disappointing conclusion you did:

I think the Chromecast is playing Ogg Vorbis transcoded to AAC. That would absolutely explain the degraded sound quality I noticed. Transcoding is a terrible idea. Transcoding a lossy-compressed format to another lossy-compressed format sounds like garbage. If this is what’s happening with Spotify Connect and Chromecast...