Triode wrote: > Glad its working... I find the quality variable across tracks. I would > never claim 320k of any lossy compression to be as good as 44.1 lossless > or higher bitrates. Its listenable to though, whereas the 128k > offerings of e.g. napster were not even listenable to for me! I use and enjoy Spotify a lot, mainly because it allows me to "trial" music before I buy - and I usually do end up buying the CD if I like the music because the sound quality when ripped to FLAC is just hugely better than streaming off Spotify.
To me Spotify has always sounded somewhat "bland" in an easy-listening sort of way. It sounds closer to FM pop/rock radio than CD so I suspected there was something up so did a bit of experimentation of my own. I "recorded" two or three pieces of music from Spotify and compared with the same pieces from CDs ripped to FLAC. Where possible I used the same editions, avoiding recent remasters. Using my PC and Audacity I recorded the analogue output from the Receiver for both Spotify and CD on my PC and then looked at the wave forms. The difference is visible and stark! The bit-rate is something of a red herring. The major issue is that Spotify appear to use severe dynamic compression. I tried recording at various levels to make sure I was not pushing the recording to clip, but regardless of how loud or quiet the recording the wave form was always the same shape, a straight, flat, top that looks like it is a recording pushed to clipping but when looked at closely it was clear that quiet passages were being boosted to the same level as the loud bits. This makes the music easier to listen to in noisy environments or via cheap reproduction equipment that finds it difficult to cope with dynamic contrasts, but it is far from ideal if you have any pretentions to high fidelity music reproduction. I could have just been unlucky with the choice of music but I doubt it. They suspect they do this for two reasons; partly to make the music easier to hear in sub-optimal environments (parties, via mobile phones etc) and partly to make it less good sounding than the CD in order to encourage the listener to buy the recording. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ TheLastMan's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=16021 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=79706 _______________________________________________ plugins mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/plugins
