[JJ4884]

Hey!
I know that the Audiophile Community is mostly against streaming music due to "Lower quality compression", but, Is there a preference among the community for an online Music Service?
So far,I am signed up for Slacker Radio, Spotify, Last FM, Google Play Music, and looking into Xbox Music. All free accounts.

 

[LuvMeSumNoise]

look into Deezer starts in USA on monday 9/15 Supports FLAC file streaming. Very interested to try it! (unfortunately for the first few months only available to Sonos users...)

 

[jodgey4]

Spotify Premium streams at full 320 kbps MP3, which I find to be indistinguishable from FLAC. That's a hot subject of debate with quite a few caveats.

 

[bobby12]

Spotify Premium streams at full 320 kbps MP3, which I find to be indistinguishable from FLAC. That's a hot subject of debate with quite a few caveats.

extreme quality = 320 kbps?
spotify's 320 kbps sounds lower than that, at least to me.
playing the song in 320 on neutron or rock player sounds better.

 

[LuvMeSumNoise]

I found google play at 320kbps to sound better than spotify at the same. More depth and dynamics for some reason comes through, but at a lower volume. Never understood it.

 

[bobby12]

I found google play at 320kbps to sound better than spotify at the same. More depth and dynamics for some reason comes through, but at a lower volume. Never understood it.

yeah it sounds poor especially since it claims to be 320kbps.

I tried their premium service for a month and I was extremely disappointed. Sounds similar to 128kbps

 

[jodgey4]

Perhaps tomorrow I'll do a bit by bit comparison of some files, I have files coming from a wide variety of places. Funny enough, I usually don't hear a difference b/w FLAC and 320 mp3, but I can sometimes with WAV and FLAC? Driver weirdness I'm sure, lol. All I know is that Spotify has the full FR unlike some other older services that claim 320 kbps and yet have obvious low pass filters at ~16kHz indicating compression. Try Fidelify as your Spotify Premium player if you're on PC, it offers other driver support you can try.

 

[jodgey4]

Also, you have to manually set Spotify to stream at full quality, otherwise it's 192 or 256 kbps, just FYI. Double check your settings! It sounds the same AFAIK, other than gain.

 

[bobby12]

Also, you have to manually set Spotify to stream at full quality, otherwise it's 192 or 256 kbps, just FYI. Double check your settings! It sounds the same AFAIK, other than gain.

"Full quality" = Extreme Quality? I've set both download and stream to extreme quality and it still sounds bad.

Not sure if I'm doing something wrong, or what. The instruments sounded okay, but the vocals sounded really recessed and poor overall like what you would find in some bad youtube rips at 128kbps and I found myself turning up the volume more than I usually do.

I've heard 192kbps before and it sounds better than spotify IMO. Amazon prime music streaming sounds better too and that's lower apparently.

I was using my CIEMs so that might be why? I'm not trying to hate on spotify. I really want to use it, but I don't want to listen at lower quality.

 

[jodgey4]

Bizarre, could you give me example tracks I could test between the two?

 

[LuvMeSumNoise]

Bizarre, could you give me example tracks I could test between the two?

Between google play and spotify on mobile highest possible quality (im using lg g2) 1st movement Beethoven 7th symphony, phillip glass einstine on the beach spaceship, wintersun time 1 sons of winter and stars. Those are the three i compared.

 

[jodgey4]

I'll check those out on all the services I can and report back. If something is real whack, I'll do some FR analysis in Audacity and compression/clipping tests, and I think there's bit rate checking software out there.

 

[IBIubbleTea]

Just wondering but did you guys clear the spotify cache before selecting high quality stream? You might have still had the normal quality music when you selected high quality. Read this from their website....

 

[bobby12]

Just wondering but did you guys clear the spotify cache before selecting high quality stream? You might have still had the normal quality music when you selected high quality. Read this from their website....

Thanks. That fixed my problem.

I don't think it's as good as my downloaded 320kbps using a different player, but very close. It doesn't sound like **** now

 

[LuvMeSumNoise]

I did that when I first started their free trial. Then restarted my phone when I noticed difference because LG put some weird limits on software access to their audio codex... or so I have heard. Still noticed the difference between spotify and google play. bur what I found most odd was max volume was different between the two as well.