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.

[mwstandsfor]

Crazy how this is still an issue. Looking for solutions as on mobile it is unbearable lately. 
went to a live show the other day and forgot what non compressed sound was like. And was like. wth have I been doing to my ears!

everyone tells me it’s the normalisation. But it’s not. I’ve set it to the max quality and it’s still noticeable. It reminds me of the days when you tried to cram as many songs onto your 128mb mp3 player. But as a kid you could deal with it. 

[Defne_666]

The worst part is there had been dona an experiment and they found out compressed music damages your ears too.And the quality is so bad.Spotify doesnt care about music or quality they are just a company who likes some money. 😞

[Idontusespotassfy]

I left Spotify a couple years ago because of this issue. I now only buy my music on apple music (I don’t stream the music I buy it and download it to the phone and don’t have a membership), and it still has issues because apple themselves also have gotten rid of the headphone jacks in their phones and the streamed bluetooth music has compression and pace issues (it laggs). Also the audio sounds a little off but nowhere near as bad as spotify. Doesn’t get fixed even if you use an adapter (I tried). Now I have an iPod touch 7th Gen with an actual audio Jack. It works perfectly and sounds so good on my speaker! Im running IOS 15.8.5 if anyone is wondering. I actually got ear damage from listening to music through my android phone and spotify. I went to an ear doctor and have some strange issue with my ears. They said my hearing is fine and healthy but I had a weird concerning issue where I was hearing things during the test that weren’t there and responding to them. It took a long time but after changing my listening device and hardware I now feel completely normal. This actually caused a huge issue with my music production as an artist as now and spiraled a depression. I noticed a change instantly after leaving spotify and going back to the old fashion route. I highly recommend this to anyone else because not only are you supporting the artist and giving them more money that spotify is practically stealing from them. But you are also getting better music quality and preventing ear damage along the way.