Is Spotify Extreme Quality good enough for you guys? What is the minimum bit-rate you audiophiles...

You may want to try MOG if it is available in your area. MOG is 320 Kbps for only $5 a month for desktop only (no phone usage.) 

 

I have Spotify Unlimited (not Premium) as well as MOG. If you don't need it on your phone, you won't be able to beat the sound quality of MOG for $5 a month. I've heard plenty of people say MOG sounds better, but I don't think I've ever found anyone who has both who says Spotify sounds better. However, I like Spotify so well that I am paying for both.

 

There are some differences between the two services.

 

1. They do not have exactly the same track / artist / album availability although they are quite similar. One reason I have both is the availability of music is not exactly the same.

 

2. MOG does not have gapless playback. There are some albums that are not supposed to have any gaps between the songs. On MOG, these albums have a brief gap of silence between songs which can be annoying.

 

3. They are each a little different in their user interfaces. Creating playlists, searching for music, sharing playlists, having the service generate it's own "radio" selections, etc. is a little different on each service. It's difficult to say which is better in this area. It takes a little while to get used to the navigation and user interface for each service and some folks may prefer one over the other.

 

If you don't need to use the service on your phone, I would say the decision is easy. Get MOG if it is available in your area for $5 a month. If you need to use the service on your phone, then you will be spending $10 a month either way and the decision will not be as clear cut.

I like Spotify better in terms of layout and user friendliness and MOG better in terms of sound quality.

I listen to streaming music off my iPhone all the time in the car. After dabbling with MOG, I settled on Spotify because I prefer the user interface as well as its radio functionality. As far as sound quality goes at 320 Kbps equivalent, I couldn't hear a difference in my car. That said, while my car stereo is pretty sweet, it still doesn't compare to listening through a set of reference level headphones. I wish I could say that I A/Bed the two services through a set of phones, but I didn't. Finally, may read on other forums that MOG has more content available at 320. That definitely was true at one point, but I think Spitify has caught up.

To answer your question about sq more generally, I'm content wih 320 MP3 / 256 AAC / Ogg Vorbis level 9 compressed music. While I have, on occasion, been able to pick out an artifact or two when A/Bing near these near-CD quality formats against uncompressed CD tracks in certain very complex passages, this is rare. Usually I can't hear any difference. IMHO a much bigger problem is frequent poor recording or mastering quality of albums. I think that often, when people point out artifacts in [near-CD quality] compressed music, they are actually hearing flaws from the recording/mattering process.