Terrible audio quality on Spotify Free

[TechTornado]

A friend of mine has Spotify free and we're playing it in the car yesterday, I noticed that the sound was grainy/tinny and was missing that full-depth of sound that even FM or Satellite radio can do. 

The audio quality is comparable to a 85kbit/sec MP3. (High compression, high loss) 

Hearing that terrible quality is incredibly disappointing and is there anything that can be done in app settings to boost the bitrate to levels that aren't going to destroy your ears? 

It gave me flashbacks of when Pandora did something similar, but they compressed the audio down to a 64kbit MP3. I had to leave Pandora and goto Spotify (which sounded great on free back in 2015) What changed and why is history repeating itself?

To put it simply, bleeding ears is an understatement, the absolute minimum to prevent hearing damage should be better than radio at 128kbit/sec, but right now, it's so much worse! 

When will this be fixed?

Playback specs:
iPhone SE - iOS 10.3.3 - Latest spotify version

Cricket Service (At&t LTE) 

Nissan Leaf + Bluetooth audio

Also, in the same car with spotify paid, the audio quality is significantly better. I was expecting the same standard of quality on free just with an occasional ad like Pandora.