Spotify, is the quality good enough? - Page 4

right on, spotify used to have some floyd.. now its just floyd+ish

I hate to revive a dead thread but its better than starting a new one...

I have a Spotify Premium account and loved it until I got my Dragonfly DAC/amp for Christmas.  Though they claim 'extreme' quality on 99.9% of their songs I find that this no to be the case; quality varies too widely to be true.  I have played around with MOG for a few minutes and the interface is frustrating compared to the simple layout of Spotify. Was curious if anyone compared them to each other or Rdio recently as all reliable threads/review are pretty old.

Also having technical problems with both MOG and Spotfiy not buffering/loading right.  My connection runs over 24 Mbps so who knows.

(Edit) After signing up for a second account because apparently I can't push my current free MOG account up to a full 7 day trial.  They would rather me create a new account with another email on my phone.  They also claimed when I created my original account that I would be doing a full trial but neither the desktop or Android app wouldn't work because I needed a primo account. So I set it up through the Android app for a 7 day trial, burning yet another email account.  I now fully appreciate how cool the Spotify app is. The MOG app is ugly, clunky and confusing and the web player can't seem to hold a buffer with Chrome.  BUT it sounds a whole heck of a lot better in a lot of cases.  In the more popular tracks its more or less equal with a small nod toward MOG.  I may try Rdio and update tomorrow...  If no one replies I may end up creating a new thread with my thoughts.

Quote:

Originally Posted by gidgiddonihah 

I hate to revive a dead thread but its better than starting a new one...

 

I have a Spotify Premium account and loved it until I got my Dragonfly DAC/amp for Christmas.  Though they claim 'extreme' quality on 99.9% of their songs I find that this no to be the case; quality varies too widely to be true.  I have played around with MOG for a few minutes and the interface is frustrating compared to the simple layout of Spotify. Was curious if anyone compared them to each other or Rdio recently as all reliable threads/review are pretty old.

 

Also having technical problems with both MOG and Spotfiy not buffering/loading right.  My connection runs over 24 Mbps so who knows.

 

(Edit) After signing up for a second account because apparently I can't push my current free MOG account up to a full 7 day trial.  They would rather me create a new account with another email on my phone.  They also claimed when I created my original account that I would be doing a full trial but neither the desktop or Android app wouldn't work because I needed a primo account. So I set it up through the Android app for a 7 day trial, burning yet another email account.  I now fully appreciate how cool the Spotify app is. The MOG app is ugly, clunky and confusing and the web player can't seem to hold a buffer with Chrome.  BUT it sounds a whole heck of a lot better in a lot of cases.  In the more popular tracks its more or less equal with a small nod toward MOG.  I may try Rdio and update tomorrow...  If no one replies I may end up creating a new thread with my thoughts.

Just got my first I touch and had been trying Spotify V MOG, (again) and I must say, MoG is the clear winner for me. The Itouch app for MOG is almost gapless, and the sound quality is Primo. I must agree that for the PC's spotify is seamless, but aain MOG sounds better

I've had both services for as long as they have been available in the US.  I go to MOG first, then Spotify.  Agree that the Spotify interface is more mature and user friendly compared to MOG.  But even though MOG can be somewhat clumsy to navigate, I prefer it overall because of the better music discovery with their radio.  

Sound quality is tough to choose between the two.  

Spotify streams Vorbis Q9 (~320 kbps) in "Extreme" quality and Q5 (~160 kbps) in high quality.  Spotify was confronted about only having a small portion of their library encoded at -q9, but that was well over a year ago and they have made vast upgrades to their library to get the highest quality streams made available.

MOG streams mp3 at 320 kbps or 256 kbps, and this is all dependent on how the record labels make their music library available to them.  I recall that a couple of larger labels are only encoded at 256 kbps.  

That said, I seem to prefer MOG for sound, but this opinion is not based on any legitimate testing that could withstand any scrutiny. I can't imagine that adding a DAC/amp would suddenly make either service sound terrible or otherwise inadequate.   I feel confident that a proper ABX test would show that few could tell the difference between the highest quality streams and a CD or lossless file.

It made a huge difference because I was just running off my motherboard headphone jack and my SII and both sound terrible (it's what you get when the motherboard is the lowest priority when building a PC--not smart). When I hooked in the new DAC everything became much more transparent, including the quality of the track file.  I stumbled on several tracks in my library that I play quite a bit and were lower quality MP3s (around 192) instead of the FLAC versions.  Spotify isn't terrible per se.  Its just MOG sounds a lot better . I also read that Spotify is just upconverting the existing 'high' quality tracks into the 'extreme' format.  I'll do a blind test when I get home tonight.  Anyone tried Rdio?

(Edit) Rdio sounded poorly compressed on the two tracks I had time to listen to.  Both MOG and Spotify sounded fuller.  I'll update when I can.  

(Edit 2) I can't seem to stay away ...  Rdio sounded bad because apparently it was scaling down due to the slow connection from my Ad-Hoc network from my phone.  Forgot to disable it when I got back in range of Wi-Fi.