Spotify HiFi is still MIA after three years, and now so is my subscription | Hacker News Reader

Spotify HiFi is still MIA after three years, and now so is my subscription

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55 pointsthunderbong81 comments

I know this is controversial but personally, Spotify Premium is already hifi. I simply cannot hear the difference between 320kbit/s and higher bitrates. I have high-end audio equipment at home, a decent DAC, etc...once I go beyond Spotify Free's 160kbps I truly can't hear the difference.

I'm not calling anyone a liar, I'm sure some folks can. But I think it's worth considering how important "hifi" bitrates are to you beyond a bigger number.

I'm no audiophile, but even when downloading the highest quality files and playing them locally Spotify is still noticeably worse quality than the default AAC files that Apple Music downloads for me on my purchased music. Spotify just sounds like there is no depth to any of the sound, where I can immediately feel the difference with Apple Music - especially with percussion heavy music.

I don't doubt that you feel the difference between the two - but that doesn't mean there is a difference.

Without a double-blind test, it's just conjecture. Audio is notoriously subjective, and existing research shows that 320kbps audio is indistinguishable from lossless.

And to be clear, this isn't an accusation that you're necessarily imagining differences in sound. It could even be something as simple as one source being very slightly quieter than the other (due to the player software rather than differences in the audio encoding).

A good test I typically use is this ABX test:

https://abx.digitalfeed.net/

> I'm no audiophile, but even when downloading the highest quality files and playing them locally Spotify is still noticeably worse quality than the default AAC files that Apple Music downloads for me on my purchased music.

That's simply impossible, the Spotify client does not change your local files, it simply plays through your OS audio stack. You are noticing the difference in loudness, you can't know if the files you downloaded have been mastered the same way than the ones Apple Music is playing.

I just tried with some of my own music, played the exactly same file as a WAV rendered from my DAW and then a very high bitrate export through the Spotify client as a local file, there's absolutely no difference.

Did you confirm this with blind testing?

Often it’s also just loudness/dynamic range compression.

Yeah you'd need to level match a couple of tracks, then blind test between them. Or else turn off normalisation.

Agreed. I release my own music on everything except Spotify as they do something horrible to them (and they're pretty awful people too).

Audio compression is based on psychoacoustic methods. Perhaps it's not your ears but different wiring in your brain that makes you capable of telling the difference.

That may be the case. I believe if you've listened to a track long enough, some of the minor details that lossy encoding remove are remembered and if you're listening closely enough, you notice their absence. My most recent experience was a particular moment in a song. I was listening to the lossy encoded version and it sounded weird to me. I grabbed the original file and that's when I noticed the difference. I believe someone else would have not noticed, but I've been listening to the lossless version and perhaps my brain has a vivid memory of that section. I don't notice when I'm playing with cheaper headphones and speakers.

Totally anecdotal, but I got slightly better speakers and could instantly tell the difference between a Spotify stream and Bandcamp-sourced FLACs or mp3s

The rumor I've heard is that often artists upload tracks to Spotify with a lossy codec, and then Spotify re-encodes as ogg for transport imposing a second loss on the encoding.

I don't know if it's psychosomatic or not, but with a decent amplifier and speakers the difference was actually pretty shocking. I am not an audiophile and I was not trying to do a comparison -- I merely bought an album on Bandcamp and listened to it and thought "huh, my Spotify streams sound kind of muddy compared to this"

Take that with a grain of salt, I guess

Similarly, on Apple Music with some tracks I can hear a difference when switching between AAC and lossless modes. In fact the reason I know this is because one day when listening to music, one particular track sounded unusually bad and switching on lossless fixed it.

Genre likely has some bearing on whether a person can hear the difference or not, with some genres being generally being more compressed for example which will reduce the gap between formats. It would also make sense that each codec has genres it’s more or less suited for.

I think that technically you can make lossy sound really good - almost indistinguishable.

I also think that they may fail badly at it - I've heard lossy formats that sound like crap, and lossless that sound similarly bad. There's a lot more that goes into it beyond just "what is the setting on the compressor".

I'm honestly glad to hear you say that. I have some lossless audio I bought off Bandcamp, so I'll set it up again and do another test. I want lossless music to matter to me, but so far it hasn't. It's also worth linking to this famous NPR quiz comparing MP3 bitrates [0]

https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/02/411473508/...

That NPR quiz has a confusing interface.

You can play the clips by pressing the play buttons next to them, which works as expected. If you stop a clip it resets so next time you click its play button it again starts from the beginning.

You can also click within the progress bar of a playing clip and it will jump to that spot, which is handy for repeating a section somewhere in the middle.

You can also click in the progress area of a clip when no clip is playing and it will start playing at the appropriate offset, but not necessarily the clip whose progress bar you clicked. It actually plays the last clip whose play button you pressed. It does not start the progress bar for that clip (or the clip you clicked in) so you won't see that it is not playing the clip you expected. You'll only notice it if the last play button you clicked was for a different song.

This completely messed up the quiz for me. I'd press the play button on each clip of a set and listen all the way through. Say I thought I heard some percussion 3/4 of the way through that seemed off on one of them. I'd then play just that part by clicking in the progress area of the three clip about 3/4 of the way in, thinking that is letting me hear that section of each clip. Instead it is just giving me that section of the third clip each time.

320Kb/s MP3 is fine for most things, and so is spotify quality in most cases. But there's also a bunch of bad tracks that I feel like is probably bad re-encodes, and sometimes bad source material. And yes, whether you can hear crunchiness depends on how you listen - you can't tell the difference over a car stereo when driving on a highway - and if you listen over bluetooth you're already hearing a bad re-encode, at least until BLE audio and LC3 is the norm - but IEMs in a home or quiet office is a different story and then it can get quite... distracting.

A launch of a lossless feature might also imply either a change of workflow to import tracks from artists, or at least just a re-upload of the source material. That I find exciting, and is something I would consider paying for.

If anyone thinks they can tell the difference, I encourage them to take this abx test comparing lossy/lossless streaming. I would be shocked if you pass:

https://abx.digitalfeed.net/

Almost no one can tell a difference with today's encoders (unless the track is particularly degenerate for the encoder) but I think there is an edge case: listening over Bluetooth.

When the already encoded audio is then encoded again into AptX or SBC or AAC, it starts to introduce audible artifacting - nothing most people would immediately notice but audible artifacting nonetheless.

I don't believe a DAC is going to do anything for you, with Spotify. I agree with you there... but saying Spotify is already hifi? Absolutely not.

My DAC plugged into Spotify does nothing for me, and I don't expect it to. Plug that DAC into Apple Music or Tidal, and put on a good pair of cans? Completely different world.

> Spotify Premium is already hifi

Hard disagree.

I do agree that for the majority of people, the 320kbit/s is absolutely enough for most people (arguably 160kbps is).

But it's not "hifi". And I don't mean "With extremely high end headphones and a dac, a trained ear, and holding your tongue at the right angle you can just barely make out a difference" - it's very noticable even with mediocre equipment. It's a rather lossy 320kbit/s too.

That's why a "hifi" tier makes sense, they don't currently serve that market at all.

I don't care about lossless, but I find the Atmos mixes are usually exceptional. I don't know if it's that they are producing a more "audiophile" mix, or if it's the format, or something else entirely, but it's night and day for me.

Often (but not always) they fall less victim to the “loudness wars” compared to the same track mixed for stereo.

I don't think that's true - the loudness wars haven't really been a thing for a few years now, the streaming services all "normalise" the loudness which makes pushing it in the master pointless.

There are very noticeable differences on some recordings. I think that’s probably a question of whether the Atmos version is a straight re-encoding or whether they took the time to do some other editing as well, which can make these comparisons really confusing since people will swear they’re talking about the same thing.

As I understand it, atmos / spatial recordings are a full re-master when it's done to older recordings so yeah, there's definitely going to be a big difference when compared to masters from years or decades ago.

Definitely - in addition to higher bit rates and depths I’m sure some people are tempted to use denoising or more advanced filtering, too.

I came here to exactly say this. I would not pay more per month to have a "better" bitrate.

Longtime Spotify user here. I was part of the beta all the way back in 2013. I switched to Apple Music this year alongside an app that syncs the daily playlists with Apple Music.

I feel like as time goes on, the Apple Music playlist recommendations are getting better and better, but what kept me with Apple Music was actually the integrate with Sonos. I have the Arc, Sub and 2 Era 500s, and the spatial audio tracks are incredible. It reminds me of a time I used to just sit back and listen to music in my room as a kid, always discovering something new about a track that I never really hear.

The spatial audio is also keeping me with Apple Music, although I will say that while most are incredible, sometimes I'll come across an album where the spatial mix is laughably terrible.

Can you link the app that syncs those playlists?

https://soundiiz.com/

https://www.tunemymusic.com/

https://www.songshift.com/

And I'm sure there are others.

Sonos hasn’t released the Era 500 speakers yet?

Some comment I read here the other day made me realize it feels like Spotify gets an unusually high share of negative news coverage. Despite this, I personally think it's a really great product and service.

Which makes me wonder: Could there be an ulterior motive driving this coverage?

Two things that make me quite dislike Spotify (as a real actual human ;) is their attempt to monopolize and exclusive-ize podcasts, which I treasure as an open medium, and that they pay less money back to artists (I believe).

Perhaps it's my personal bias stemming from what I believe to be legitmate gripes with Spotify, but I feel like perhaps they get more negative coverage because they do negative things.

The way their apps are pushy about whatever tangentially-related audio product they’re decided to burn money on this month also isn’t great. If that stuff really has to be part of the main app, it should be sequestered to its own tab and not be seen unless sought out.

I think I read that the "pays less" thing was FUD, but am unable to find it now. Will share if I can dig it up later :)

Re podcasts: Very true, I didn't like that push either. FWIW, Spotify recently agreed to let Joe Rogan's podcast be distributed on multiple platforms again.

Spotify is the largest music streamer by far, being over twice as large as its next biggest competitor, Apple Music. It's natural that the company would be the biggest target for criticism, both for Spotify-specific problems and as a stand-in for the whole industry. Also, speaking as a mostly-satisfied subscriber, Spotify still has a lot of issues. The quality of the desktop client in particular is poor and it never seems to improve.

This is almost certainly confirmation bias, but I feel like mainstream publications write negatively about Spotify way more than they do iPhone or Google Search. We know both the latter have several issues of their own, but I feel like I learn about most of them via small blogs linked to from here.

I bet there’s also just selection bias: if you don’t use it, you’re more likely to skip a story about and if you use services like Twitter or Facebook they’ll stop suggesting things you don’t click on.

I use Spotify without issue except for one thing that really irks me:

Baked in advertisements in podcasts for which I PAY FOR. Like, I literally pay Spotify to not give me ads. And then podcasts come in and not only add in baked in ads at the beginning but also then the host of the show has to do an ad blurb every 20 minutes. Conan O'Brien I'm looking at you.

What's not to understand? Spotify doesn't control the ads baked into content. They control their ads. They can't remove the ads in podcasts. Paying for YouTube Premium doesn't remove ad reads from the creator.

Your options are to support the podcast directly for an ad free experience if it exists, listen to the podcast anyway, or stop supporting podcasts that do this by not listening to them.

One of the ads I mention are ones that are automatically added by Spotify to the front of the podcast that specifically target me. I've heard them mention where I live many times.

Hm, given that Spotify has a 320kbps AAC version (IIRC), why do people want lossless? Who can tell the difference?

For reference, 192kbps mp3 is considered "transparent" for most people. 320kbps mp3 is considered by many experts to be essentially indistinguishable from lossless in most cases.

AAC is a more advanced codec than mp3. An AAC file with the same bitrate as an MP3 file will have higher quality audio (that is, closer to the original). Depending on the type of audio being encoded, you might be getting double digit percentage improvements [0] in quality over mp3. So the "very high" quality setting on Spotify is indeed very, very high quality.

[0] Which is to say, AAC produces files 10%+ smaller than MP3 for equivalent fidelity

> For reference, 192kbps mp3 is considered "transparent" for most people.

With the caveat that the right encoder has been used. Late 90s/early 00s 192k MP3s will sound audibly worse than those encoded by LAME[0] some time in the past decade due to the many improvements and optimizations that encoder has seen over the years.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LAME

They don't understand how lossy compression works.

I would like to take this opportunity to ask others:

- What services do you use for lossless music streaming?

- When you have a FLAC file, how do you listen to it in an Android phone or a Linux/Windows machine? Which apps/softwares? And does headphone/speaker quality make a difference- or is it bottlenecked by the audio card of the PC/phone?

I am a noob, and would like the answers, along with some good pointers, if possible.

I convert and upload my flac files to Apple Music which is available cross-platform, though poor on linux.

Speaker quality makes a huge difference according to my experiences from lower end $30 portable speaker to stereo sound systems in cars. Last weekend I rented a Jeep Grand Cherokee. Its sound quality is noticeably terrible because I couldn't hear some backing violin/piano sound of a symphony compared with my own car.

> What services do you use for lossless music streaming?

- Now, I'm using Navidrome hosted on my home server (local collection). I also have MPD configured on the same server which is connected to my AV receiver via optical.

- I almost always use my Mac (I use ALAC instead of FLAC). I either use the Navidrome interface, a subsonic client (submariner), or local copies with Doppler. I have a pair of Hifiman Sundara for proper listening (JDS Labs DAC and amplifier), an IEM when there's too much noise outside, and various other headphones tied to different devices. I also do airplay to a couple Homepod Mini.

I need the amp for the Sundara, nothing else can drive it apart from the AV receiver. Less than good encoded files sound awful on the better headphones and speakers, especially if you've listened to the lossless files. As an analogy, I can take pictures taken from a phone. On the screen phone, it looks great, but not so good when displayed on a 43" display, but still ok. So I don't mind listening to a 128kbps mp3 file, but I found lossless files are always clearer and fill the space better.

Android: vanilla https://vanilla-music.github.io/

Iphone: vlc

Linux: rhythmbox

Headphones/speaker quality are vastly more important than anything else for quality sound imho.

I just use VLC on android with wired headphones. Bluetooth is not a high fidelity connection.

There are high-fidelity Bluetooth codecs such as LDAC (~1000kbps), which Android has native support for.

I'm actually more bothered by more and more 'Remastered' tracks. I don't mind these alternate versions--what I don't want are original recordings disappearing and being replaced by these remastered ones that are so smooth as to lose their character. They may be more suitable for new listeners but why do the original versions have to disappear?

Really love the Audiophile tantrum because Spotify knows full well 320kbps Vorbis is transparent and why add a lossless mode that could go ignored?.

I'm surprised he went with Apple Music rather than Tidal if he's paranoid about HiFi audio.

Even Tidal has questionable HiFi (https://youtu.be/pRjsu9-Vznc)

They are phasing out MQA and use FLAC nowadays.

imo Apple Music's codec actually sounds really good. Tidal's lack of songs was the dealbreaker for me.

Also surprisingly, Apple Music is also one of the few streaming services that allows playback-capable third party clients. One can use Cider[0] among other options instead of iTunes or the Music apps.

With as opinionated as people are about music player UX, it’s surprising that Tidal or other smaller competitors haven’t embraced third party player apps. It’d be an easy win over Spotify, which deprecated libspotify ages ago and has yet to provide a playback-capable replacement despite promises otherwise.

[0]: https://cider.sh/

If you have Spotify Premium, it's been possible for years to set up a Spotify Connect receiver, and you can control your connect receivers via API, so it is in fact possible to use a third party client, if one exists.

Spot knocked it out of the park with this approach. If you just want the Spotify Receiver, you could use the underlying library that doubles as a CLI, librespot, but Spot serves as a nice example of using the Spotify APIs to actually search your library and control the receiver without the Spotify app and handles this all for you.

https://github.com/xou816/spot

Connect isn’t bad if your primary method of listening to music is through smart speakers or a home entertainment setup with a receiver or something, but it’s unnecessarily complicated if you just want to listen through headphones on your PC and downright impractical for mobile listening.

As for librespot, it’s nice work but it’s also technically against the TOS since it’s reverse engineered, which means Spotify could ban users using it whenever they like. There’s also risk of your favorite app using it going away if they decide to take legal action against the project.

I looked into swapping to Apple Music before but couldn't find a way to play lossless music on Linux making swapping pointless. Apparently[0] decryption for lossless isn't supported for 3rd party clients.

Anyone know of a way around this?

[0]: https://github.com/ciderapp/Cider/discussions/889

Tidal's catalog is disappointing but their audio quality and UX are good enough for me when I want to listen to popular songs. A lot of the music I listen to isn't even on Spotify anyway so I'm not able to just have one music streaming account.

Apple has several levels of audio to chose from:

Lossy AAC at 256Kbit

Lossless ALAC up to 24-bit/48 kHz

Hi-Res Lossless ALAC up to a maximum resolution of 24-bit/192 kHz.

They also have the spatial track options on a lot of music in Atmos, if that’s your thing.

All options are included with the base subscription, but listening to the Hi-Res audio typically requires an external DAC as well.

Major drawback of Apple Hi Res is that Apple headphones dont support it (bluetooth is lossy), and even their recommended 3.5mm adapter converts it down to 48kHz (https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212183)

About 4 years ago I switched from Spotify to Tidal. I initially went for the audio quality, thinking I'd be sacrificing the amazing curated playlists that Spotify's algorithms produced for me. I used some app to transfer over all my favorited music and rebuild my playlists. It took Tidal's algorithms a day or two to catch up on my tastes, but then it was outperforming Spotify on playlist creation. I was very surprised. It's a bit more expensive, but soooo worth it for the much better UX, audio quality, and peace of mind that Tidal fairly compensates artists

I can only assume they’ve done their market research and decided to not bother with the “audiophile” segment.

For everybody that really needs extra inaudible bits, there’s always Tidal, Apple Music etc., but personally, I just run the occasional speedtest over 5G while listening to Spotify if I feel like wasting bandwidth.

Audiophile pro tip: Make sure to listen to lossless 24 bit/96 kHz files via a compressed Bluetooth connection or the AAC-256 analog-digital-analog reencoding adapter contraption of the Airpods Max for extra warmth and richness!

> Audiophile pro tip: Make sure to listen to lossless 24 bit/96 kHz files via a compressed Bluetooth connection or the AAC-256 analog-digital-analog reencoding adapter contraption of the Airpods Max for extra warmth and richness!

People who get that serious about listening to music usually have serious equipment (which you can get for almost the same price as the Airpods Max). It was about $500 for my Sundara and JDS Labs stack. You can go cheaper with the IEM/small DAC route. Wireless is usually a no go.

they spent those 3 years redesigning the UI 20 times.

While I wouldn't really call myself an audiophile, I would say that I've had exposure to excellent hifi systems and have been producing and working with audio/music since I was a teenager.

I've also never been able to reliably pick out between lossy and lossless formats, especially at the fidelity that streaming services generally stream at (not the data saver version). If I listen extremely closely and repeatedly to the same section of music, I usually can hear a difference, but it's only under those conditions where that's the case. Even then, I've gotten some of those wrong.

So when I see articles like this, I just can't help but roll my eyes a bit. It seems asinine to give up the actual killer feature he cares about in the music suggestions for something that is likely imperceptible, even to a self proclaimed audio nerd.

[Created an account to comment here in the hopes that a Spotify employee will see this]

Please for the love of music, figure out a better solution to your audible watermarking. I hear what sounds like a tenth of a second cut out of the track with the track glued back together. It sounds like shit. This creates conditions where the only way to hear an unmolested track is to download it illegally as there is a lot of stuff not available on a new CD anymore.

How can you know this is watermarking?

I’ve experienced some audio glitching with Spotify as well, which usually went away after clearing my local cache. I’d be really surprised if it really was watermarking.

might also be a bad conversion between 44kHz and 48kHz

The product quality and experience differential between Spotify and literally every other competing music platform, is so unbelievably large that if Hi-Fi is the the straw that broke your subscription's back I tend to think "feels like that guy had other stuff going on" [1] (for example: you're just trying to stir up drama).

In a world where Apple Music, Tidal, and YouTube Music cost $10/month; Spotify could cost $30/mo before I would start questioning whether it is delivering enough of better experience to justify its higher cost. And, probably, $40/mo is the straw that breaks the subscription. That's how much better Spotify is.

I'll pay for Spotify Supremium whenever it drops. But, seriously, no one cares about Hi-Fi quality. I'm actually more interested in the bundled audiobook hours that have been rumored.

[1] https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/f26113fb-c28b-4919-858b-f6e6600...

> That's how much better Spotify is.

I think the situation here is that your sentence can be finished with "...for me." It's closer to an opinion or preference than a fact.

I have been a Spotify user for a very long time, but I left for Apple Music because I wanted different features than Spotify was willing to give. Apple Music lets me edit the metadata for tracks, easily upload my own music that lives right alongside the tracks from the streaming service, and has discovery and categorization algorithms that, in my opinion, are better for me.

I am now with Apple Music where you are with Spotify: I would pay triple to keep the service going as it is now because it is great for me. I have no desire for exclusive content or add-ons like audiobooks or integrated podcasts. Give me the jukebox in the sky where I can insert my own CD and vinyl albums and I am very content.

Spatial Audio and lossless are nice add-ons to have, though.

It might be helpful if you said why you think Spotify is better. I have no idea based in this comment.

Likewise. I think they have some great playlists, but I dunno if I'd pay 3x for that.

Also with YouTube Music you can bundle in YouTube Premium which is pretty great value if you watch a lot of YouTube IMO.

I think he's right though; nobody except dumb audiophiles care about lossless.

Still, I won't go back to Spotify after I tried to export playlists from there years ago and found the only way was to copy and paste them into MS Word. Yeah really. Say no to lock-in!

Mostly agree on lossless - frankly most people don’t have gear that justifies worrying about it.

As a parent with a toddler YouTube premium is close to a necessity!

The spotify app experience is what drove me away in the first place. Once they started cluttering the home screen with TikTok style videos and banner sized ads for podcasts I have no interest in, I left for Apple Music and have not looked back.

I actually have access to audio books on my version of the app. I have a family plan and on the main account page it says that I get access to 15 hrs of audiobooks before I need to “top-up”. None of the other seats in the family plan have this though just me as the account manager.

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