Spotify sound quality

[madswitcher]

Hi Folks,
does anyone know for certain if Spotify modify the sound of the music they supply either by EQ or adding reverb etc.?

The music I am thinking of in particular is the latest remix of the Beatles Abbey Road album which sounds like they cranked up the 10KHz and the 'warm' space in the lower 100 Hzs.  It sound very wooly and screechy to me.  It can't all be bad work by the 'remixers'.

As an aside, besides milking the back catalogue, I can't actually see why they need to do this: to quote a friend of mine, "If Phil McDonald and Geoff Emerick were jointly awarded a Grammy for the work on the original, why is a remix necessary?  Nobody is advocating repainting the Mona Lisa or rebuilding the Pyramids?"

Any idea if Spotify do play around with the sound?

Regards

Mike

 

[Tubetec]

Why not upload a test file,make it a pure a sine wave with stepped frequency  20hz-20khz , let them do their thing to it ,download it back again and compare it with the original. My guess is any difference is an artifact of data compression not equalisation.

I had a buddy once ,he swore blue music could be data compressed to MP3 and subsequently restored to .wav with no loss in quality ,      I tried to explain you cant simply dump 4/5ths of the information and expect somehow the subtleties to be preserved  . He realised his mistake after carefully transcribing his entire record collection to MP3 and selling it off , only to realise later the music had gone down the plug hole in the transfer process  ;D

 

[ruairioflaherty]

Hi Folks,
does anyone know for certain if Spotify modify the sound of the music they supply either by EQ or adding reverb etc.?

The music I am thinking of in particular is the latest remix of the Beatles Abbey Road album which sounds like they cranked up the 10KHz and the 'warm' space in the lower 100 Hzs. It sound very wooly and screechy to me. It can't all be bad work by the 'remixers'.

As an aside, besides milking the back catalogue, I can't actually see why they need to do this: to quote a friend of mine, "If Phil McDonald and Geoff Emerick were jointly awarded a Grammy for the work on the original, why is a remix necessary? Nobody is advocating repainting the Mona Lisa or rebuilding the Pyramids?"

Any idea if Spotify do play around with the sound?

Regards

Mike

Fulltime mastering engineer here.

Spotify does not alter the EQ or frequency response although their various compression algorithms can alter the sound appreciably and in a negative way (they use Ogg Vorbis, MP3 and AAC depending on platform and data rates).

The Beatles remixes are questionable sadly. I did spend a day with Giles Martin at Capitol once and he was great. Smart, engaging and surprisingly honest.

 

[soliloqueen]

i'm way out of my normal forum zone here but i have been very disappointed with beatles remasters, even on CD. it's probably not spotify, it's probably them doing the remaster badly for like the 6th time.

 

[JohnRoberts]

Fulltime mastering engineer here.

Spotify does not alter the EQ or frequency response although their various compression algorithms can alter the sound appreciably and in a negative way (they use Ogg Vorbis, MP3 and AAC depending on platform and data rates).

The Beatles remixes are questionable sadly. I did spend a day with Giles Martin at Capitol once and he was great. Smart, engaging and surprisingly honest.

Dynamic processing matters... I recall back in the 70s when FM radio first competed in loudness wars. Radio station engineers would cobble together compressors with loudspeaker crossovers to fashion crude multi-band compression. I recall surprise at the different sound between new vinyl and the exact same tracks played over the radio.

JR

 

[ruairioflaherty]

Dynamic processing matters... I recall back in the 70s when FM radio first competed in loudness wars. Radio station engineers would cobble together compressors with loudspeaker crossovers to fashion crude multi-band compression. I recall surprise at the different sound between new vinyl and the exact same tracks played over the radio.

JR

Dynamic processing does indeed matter very much but I should have been clearer. In this case I was referring to data compression algorithms.

There was an edge case where Spotify would apply limiting to tracks that were below their target LUFS level to prevent overs when they added gain, but it's rare in modern music.

For those wondering where to get the best quality streaming look at Qobuz.com

I have Apple Music, Spotify, Tidal, Qobuz and Amazon Music. Qobuz sounds the most like the masters we submit, verified on my own projects.

 

[john12ax7]

Wasn't the whole marketing of Tidal being that it was lossless?

Will look into Qobuz.

 

[gyraf]

iirc, tidal was MQA, claimed to be lossless, but later proven to be lossy

the idea was to encrypt for DRM, then extract a licensing fee for every use