Why so bad sound quality?

[Fat_Lizzy]

Plan

Premium

Country

Sweden

Device

Mac Windows, Android

Operating System

Mac Windows, Android

My Question or Issue

Why is the sound quality so extremely bad on Spotify compared to other music services. Compared with Amazon, Youtube Music and Tidal. Tidal of course offers HD resolution and why can't you. Not even with the new HIFI plan you can do it why?

This particular song though was not offered in HD. It contains a lot of distortion in the recording itself, but listen on Spotify is very painful. I hope my suspicion that you're deliberately decreasing the sound quality because of the new HIFI service is not true? Anyhow i will do some thorough measurements of your streams. And if it's not the correct bit rate or differs to much from competitors you're in**bleep**! Music tested with: https://open.spotify.com/track/7BwQofH99NX3zA0Oyv277p?si=5b52bcb5e98a43de

[Sebasty]

Hey @Fat_Lizzy 

Sorry for a delayed reply, I just came across this thread and it piqued my interest as a fellow budging audiophile.

I haven't noticed major issues in sound quality when using Spotify Premium. The HiFi service is not launched yet and I don't know when it will be released. So far the audio is brought to Spotify in lossless codec (flac and wav) and then converted into ogg / aac formats with various bitrates. Highest is 320kbps for ogg and 256 for aac, for more information read this article.
Both of them should be of higher efficiency than mp3.

The Pascal song is of shockingly poor quality. But that's the case on both Spotify and Bandcamp and as an mp3 file. I don't hear any huge differences between them.
I feel the biggest differences could be coming from
- what audio quality the client is set to use;
- whether normalization is turned on;
- audio settings of the OS, including things like Dolby and sound enhancers;
- drivers and hardware.

Note: individual songs may sometimes have inferior or downright broken audio for any reason. If you find such songs that don't sound right, please report them. 🙂

For further inspection, I've seen users say Spotify's web player is better (it uses AAC), so feel free to try that one.

Hopefully any of this is of help, have a nice day!

[Molochete99]

Absolutely right, I can clearly identify so many bad sounds specially when I play "classic music for studying", so bad that it disturbs my concentration. I got to the point that I thought that something was wrong with my new iPhone! 

[ferahl]

Unfortunately I agree and it's not about the lossless options - the high quality option of Apple Music (AAC codec?) seems more detailed and crisp than Spotify high quality option on Premium. It's been enough to make me switch over a couple of times but I'm giving Spotify another chance because it has more integrations and a recommendation algorithm.

[ajbroome1]

Spotify is really bad when compared to Tidal. In Tidal offers up to full master lossless recording. I can play the same song on both services switching back and forth and Tidal wins hands down. I have  Mark Levinson sound system in my Lexus. If it wernt for the fact I like to interface better I'd drop Spotify all together

[ajescudero]

I have spent some time using Youtube Music due to lack of sound quality from Spotify. I have tested it on Android, Linux, Mac, IOS. It's not OS related. Also, I don't have the chance to move to a better plan. 
I am starting to believe that solution to this will be moving to Tidal.

https://open.spotify.com/track/4iVbMHv3CYSF3zVKKoUA18?si=d5ff1c5910894e10 

https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=4rSpas1OZ48&si=JMzPKc5r_1-6zw8G