I finally got fed up with Spotify over their awful UI updates and decided to switch over to Tidal. Imagine my surprise when I listen to a song I know extremely well and the Tidal version sounded noticeably different - it's brighter!
Well, more accurately, the cymbal wash is much more prominent. So, I compared it to a 44.1/16 WAV CD rip I did, and lo and behold - level matched in a DAW (I looped back Tidal and Spotify via RME Totalmix, and oddly enough Tidal was about 0.2dB lower peak than the CD rip and Spotify was about 0.1dB louder), Spotify in fact did sound darker. I polarity inverted it vs the CD rip (it was to-the-sample aligned), and almost all of the info that showed up as the artifacts were top end - that and a bit of transient pop.
This was on Spotify's maximum quality, which is I believe 320k Ogg Vorbis. To say I'm surprised I heard a difference is understating it. I know the limits of my hearing. I can't readily distinguish between an 320k MP3 and a 44.1/16 wave file.
Well, more accurately, the cymbal wash is much more prominent. So, I compared it to a 44.1/16 WAV CD rip I did, and lo and behold - level matched in a DAW (I looped back Tidal and Spotify via RME Totalmix, and oddly enough Tidal was about 0.2dB lower peak than the CD rip and Spotify was about 0.1dB louder), Spotify in fact did sound darker. I polarity inverted it vs the CD rip (it was to-the-sample aligned), and almost all of the info that showed up as the artifacts were top end - that and a bit of transient pop.
This was on Spotify's maximum quality, which is I believe 320k Ogg Vorbis. To say I'm surprised I heard a difference is understating it. I know the limits of my hearing. I can't readily distinguish between an 320k MP3 and a 44.1/16 wave file.
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