Spotify is horrible quality for 2023

To my surprise, even Spotify’s standard (not high or very high) is extremely difficult, if not practically impossible for the average consumer to differentiate from lossless (on better than consumer grade hardware). Upon hearing this, me and several friends decided to test it for ourselves by taking lossless files for several songs and resampling them to the same codec and bitrates that Spotify’s standard quality uses, then ABX testing the before and after with Foobar’s ABX and exclusive mode plugins (also tried the popular comparison website, but that’s apparently less accurate). One of my friends had access to a college studio, I have a dac and sennheiser, and the third had sony wxm4s. To our surprise, none of us could consistently differentiate the two. Its not perfect considering we didn’t grab the outputs directly from the streaming platforms, but that would’ve added extra variables like volume normalizing (louder sounds better).

Our conclusion is that the quality “difference” is likely placebo and probably a waste of bandwidth.

Seems like they’re building other things in rust, about time for the server? Seems like bloated servers are the biggest downside of matrix. Does anyone more educated on this topic know why it’s not a thing?

Companies can choose who works there just as people can choose who to work for. If companies don’t like what an employee is wearing then they can fire them, and if people don’t like what a company isn’t allowing them to wear they can quit.

Waiting for Spotify lossless to ditch flacs, I really want to like Tidal but I’ve had major issues every time I try and stick with it.

YouTube sound quality is poor, and 99% of your bandwidth being devoted to video is wasteful. Just use SoundCloud or something. Better yet revanced patched YT music or xmanager Spotify.

Edit: or better yet vimusic

Might as well use reddit if you cant see a little (if not a lot) of benefit to using something decentralized over its centralized counterpart.

The anonymous aspect and lack of fees/operation should be self explanatory.

Out of curiosity, what do you think LMG should do differently? I think the sponsor jokes are not appropriate but I’m curious what else people have issues with.

imo this is an extreme reaction when the story has barely matured and we dont know whats true. I feel like the reactions by people at lmg have been decent so far, but time will tell what becomes of it. hopefully for everyones sake they fix their problems like they seem to be on track to doing.