Stop the music compression- Your killing my ears

[marcusbwise]

Why are you (Spotify) still compressing the music ? I know Spotify claims they are not compressing the music if you disable the volume normalizer. Well disabling it does nothing to stop whatever compression method they are using. 

I was a premium member for years, then left to go with Amazon Hd music about 6 months ago. Well stupid me, i got the email to come back for 3 months for a one month price. So i did it, not realizing why exactly i left in the first place. As soon as i started listening again, i realized why i had left.

The heavy COMPRESSION. It's so annoying and just destroys the music. Now i suppose if you are listen through some ear buds or a low end system, it would not bother you. But if you have a highly resolving system, most of Spotify's stuff is unbearable. Half of the music produced today is already compressed, so the added compression by Spotify is literally painful to the ears. 

Listening to Classical, Jazz or instrumental music is down right awful. The dynamic range, timbre is destroyed and instruments just don't sound real. The space of the music is gone, huge orchestra's become compressed into a little box. 

What's even more sad is, if you take the pain staking time to find the same tracks and artist recordings from Spotify to plain old Youtube. Youtube sounds better. Verified this in a blind test with actual musicians and actual orchestra musicians. They were shocked to find they chose Youtube over Spotify. Every single one of them agreed, Spotify music did not sound natural or have any realism.

So can you Please Stop with the Compression. I know you are going to say your not doing that, but we all know you are. If you do not stop, i will be dropping my subscription and this time i'm not coming back.

[disgustipated1]

I'm glad I finally found ONE post about this issue. I had to wade through almost a dozen pages of links telling me how to click the normalize button as if that stops it from absolutely destroying any spot in a piece when all musicians are playing. This is the peak of a song! And it's quieter than EVERY other part! It's incredibly obvious; you can hear it kick in mid-phrase and it just kills any involvement I have as a listener. I'll have to shop around as well since no one is even acknowledging the issue.

[sansibar]

It's still the same issue. Even when listening to mp3 320kbps the difference is noticeable. When you just listen to your average Joe top 100 charts with $50 headphones or crappy earplugs ... or over bluetooth (SBC or aptX) you won't notice any difference.

Having listening equipment with standalone DAC will show the difference clearly. Heck, even my 10 year old Yamaha receiver connected to my TV produces better audio in Youtube than what Spotify offers. It's too compressed, too filtered. It's made for fast consumption. Probably i check out alternatives and will leave Spotify sooner or later.