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Spotify and Lossless?

Spotify sound quality in premium mode is absolutely fine. The main issue is that almost everything that's more than a few years old is a remaster of some sort, which may not be your preferred version.
 
Yes it is fine. I agree. Sometimes it is actually even better than others, depending on the origin of recordings.
You’d be hard-pressed to hear any differences blind-folded, let’s be honest and realistic.
The stereo perspective on 3D recordings is however slightly inferior: you don’t get the magic huge depth (the organ behind the orchestra far behind in a church kind of thing).
Still, you need speakers like ESL’s for that.
For pop/rock the sound is undistinguishable from CD.
 
IMO the differences between Spotify and higher res alternatives in generally obvious. Of course production and mastering are central to integrity but when I have listened the indicators are a contraction or narrowing in the soundstage and a much more up front presentation, comparable to radio in the car, especially dab. The higher res just seems more relaxed and less tense as it were. I’ve tried a few times but still go back to cd quality even though it is more expensive.
 
I've never tried Spotify but this thread coupled with the fact that it's integrated into the Innuos Zen has actually persuaded me to take out the 30 day free trial.
I suspect there exists a certain amount of snobbery (me included) with regard to all things hifi so it will be good to get some first hand listening experience.
In my system I've found that both Tidal & Qobuz fall slightly short of the sound quality I can achieve with local files from the Zen so if Spotify turns out to be close in quality to the other two it could represent a more cost effective way to discover new music as well as for more casual listening.
 
Curtis said:
I find tidal to be better than Spotify.
Tidal were doing 3 months free trial.
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I'm all 'freebied' out on both Tidal & Qobuz so I'll be comparing it to local files and of course Radio Paradise (which is lossless).
 
flatpopely said:
It’s good, but not that good!
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I can send you three hi-res samples – not telling which is which – and I bet you won’t hear anything significant to tell them apart.
24/96
CD
Spotify

Or you could do it yourself in earnest.
 
Spotify is really for the phone and earphone market so it’s level of compression suits car travel or phone listeners very well. It’s OK for main systems.
 
I know this is a tangent, but for me the thing that has significantly reduced my usage of Spotify is not the sound quality but the user interface. Call me old-fashioned, but I still view the album as the fundamental unit of listening. Spotify's UI mostly geared towards building up playlists of your favorite songs from different artists and albums or for otherwise listening to the playlists generated by their AI algorithms. It doesn't really cater to building a virtual collection of albums and browsing/listening to those. Yes, it has the functionality to save artists and albums to your "library", but I have found that browsing a sizable, diverse library to be really inefficient for how I would like to browse my music. I have only sampled Tidal, but it appears to have an overall copycat approach to the UI and doesn't really offer any better ability to curate, browse, and listen to a library of albums.

It's very frustrating: you have practically all the music in the world (slight exaggeration, I know), but extremely weak ability to manage it, several steps back from even the average PC MP3 player software of yesteryear. Spotify's solution of AI curation goes in a completely different direction from what I want.

I continue to use Spotify for music discovery (not through the AI stuff but through the "Fans Also Like" section associated with each band/artist), but that's pretty much it. I now, after 7-8 years of being a Spotify user, have converted to listening to local files (from Bandcamp mainly) most of the time, and just dipping into Spotify when I want something new or when I want to listen to a specific album that I don't yet have locally.

As for sound quality, I haven't done a good, rigorous comparison, but I do feel that listening on Spotify on my main system lacks a certain energy that local FLAC files have, but that could be heavily biased by knowing that it's using lossy compression.
 
I use Amazon Music having switched away from Spotify (paid) about 6 months ago.
That has lossless and 'HD' options for very little premium above Spotify if you have Prime.

I'm not always convinced however that I'm not getting a file that's been through lossy transfers, streamed to me in a lossless format. Makes it kind of pointless!
Older recording for sure and likely those which were analogue recordings. I hear the tell-tale signs of low-bit lossy compression sometimes on what are lossless streams, or worse, incorrect use of Dolby/DBX professional noise reduction decoding on old analogue copies. It's all very sloppy and lacking in standards.

My biggest worry is that this situation will worsen for sure with time.
Few care about the provenance of a file and original masters on tape are falling apart, as are close generation analogue copies.
 
gustav_errata said:
Just a bit of pedantry: "vbr" stands for "variable bit rate", meaning that an MP3 file can't be both VBR and 320kbps. Also, FWIW, Spotify uses Ogg Vorbis, not MP3, so it's an entirely different encoding.
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It's a long time since I thought about it but doesn't it mean that the mean or maybe mode bitrate was 320kbps mp3? The decision to choose ogg vorbis makes it harder to compare spotify with its competitors -- it was a good marketing decision. What I'd like to know more about is the compression in spotify streams, which I'm sure I can hear, and which I don't hear in Qobuz.

Spotify, I think, is aiming very much for people listening through relatively lo-fi equipment, their phones or bluetooth speakers.

I use both Spotify and Qobuz, I keep Spotify because they have a much better library of available recordings than Qobuz. If I find a recording I like on Spotify which isn't available on Qobuz, I buy it in a high quality format.

Another reason it's good to have both is that the search engines work differently. Searching tags is another aspect of this, and a skill in itself.
 
mandryka said:
It's a long time since I thought about it but doesn't it mean that the mean or maybe mode bitrate was 320kbps mp3.
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TBH I can't remember exactly how it works with MP3 but I think you specify a range and then the encoder varies the bit rate as necessary depending on the content of each frame (or whatever they call one chunk of time during which the bit rate is constant). However, I'm pretty sure 320kbps is the max, so given some system where you can specify a mean of 320kbps, you might as well just use a constant bit rate.

Edit: I just looked at the "lame" encoder on my system. You can do "average bit rate", where you can specify an average between 8 and 310 kbits, or you can do "variable bit rate", where you specify a quality between 0 and 9.999. Also, I was right, it's called a "frame".

mandryka said:
The decision to chose ogg vorbis makes it harder to compare spotify with its competitors -- it was a good marketing decision.
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Actually I think it was a pure business decision because for a while there MP3 was patent-encumbered, requiring licensing fees, whereas Ogg was free.

mandryka said:
What I'd like to know more about is the compression in spotify streams, which I'm sure I can hear, and which I don't hear in Qobuz.
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Can you clarify? I may have misunderstood but isn't the answer simply that Spotify uses lossy audio compression whereas Qobuz does not? Or do you mean something specifically about the actual streaming protocol? In that case I don't think there would be a difference. I know that Spotify and Tidal both use TCP for the transfer protocol for streaming, meaning they have error correction. I don't know about Qobuz but if it uses UDP, then you might be hearing errors in the packets, but I doubt they use UDP at this point.

Just for a bit of background, just in case: TCP and UDP are two major "transfer protocols", which dictate how two computers communicate and transfer data between themselves. TCP is more complicated but it allows for the client computer to say "hey, this packet of data has some bits that are wrong, please resend". UDP seems like it would be the better choice for audio, given its simplicity and the time-dependency of music, but I think at this point using TCP and getting all of the benefits that it entails with reasonable speeds is a solved problem for audio.
 
The sq difference between Spotify, Qobuz, Tidal and Amazon Music Unlimited, is obvious on a decent pair of headphones. It is, however, good for finding new music.

Unfortunately, as has been mentioned, Spotify's album management system is rubbish.

Jack
 
I use Spotify premium into a sonos into modwright jolida valve dac which lifts the sound so much, very very good indeed
 
I use Spotify family. Qobuz just for me as no-one else can be bothered with it. I take breaks from the Qobuz subscription to see if Spotify plus streamed rips will suffice. Often it will, as I do so much discovery and so little “critical listening “.
 
Tw99 said:
Spotify sound quality in premium mode is absolutely fine. The main issue is that almost everything that's more than a few years old is a remaster of some sort, which may not be your preferred version.
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I sought out an older CD pressing of Pieces of a man...the remaster on Spotify sounds so much better...
 
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