I find Spotify Premium pretty good, though I have currently suspended my subscription in favour of a 3 month Deezer trial. I would say that when you play an album on Spotify it is not glaringly obvious that you are listening to compressed files. However, if you listen longer, you will be aware that it does not have the detail or the resolution of cd quality material. Some, files sound better than others, and I would guess that classical music with a wide dynamic range may fare worse than compressed rock or other popular music.
Geoff
It only costs £10 to try Premium for a month, and there are sometimes free offers. If you have access to internet radio, try listening to one of the three Linn Radio channels which broadcast at the same bitrate as Premium (i.e. 320k). I find them very acceptable in terms of sound quality, although the catalogue is rather limited (i.e. Linn products).
Geoff
That's the 64 million dollar question, depends on your delivery device. A good bare bones player with a good PSU (like Raspberry Pi with a good HAT board) can sound ridiculously good playing Spotify Premium, that you need a good CD player to beat it. But a good delivery device playing a FLAC file, well that's hard to beat with a CDP of any price, assuming you have a DAC to match. Which is why it's becoming so popular, despite the despair of the naysayers.
So many variables to that question James
Last edited by Tim; 17-03-2018 at 15:33.
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Try Deezer hifi. You should get a trial but it needs a pc. Sound is good and Gas a great catalogue
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I started off with TIDAL Hi rez. I dismissed Spotify as not worthy of trying cos of 'the numbers'.
I was happy with Tidal for quite a few months.
Then a friend with similar musical tastes suggested I try Spotify Premium.
Free trial, so why not.
Parallel subs for 3 months to see which one I preferred.
Just in different windows on my PC so very rapid comparisons were possible on the same music.
I convinced myself that Tidal Hi was better.
I did a final comparison - yup, no way can Spotify get this level of rez.
Went back to Spotify just to double check --- and, yes, I was on Spotify already. I just got them mixed up.
Blind test!! (in effect, as I didn't know what I was listening to). I couldn't actually say one was better than the other.
So I settled with Spot Premium and have been happy ever since (well over a year now).
I had a trial on Deezer last year, but the classical catalogue is crap and I find the Spot interface better than any other.
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I have no tech knowledge of such things, but those who have seem to think that the .ogg files are significantly better than others.
Which may help explain why 320kb/s is not so bad after all.
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