This is my personal Top 5 Tips to Improve Spotify Sound Quality.
Spotify is still the most used and is arguably still the best curated streaming service around. However, spotify is not known for its sound quality as they still don’t have lossless or hifi option.
However, there are some settings that can help alleviate that as much as we can with the following.
1. Set Streaming / Download Settings to Very High
So there are several bitrates that you can use for Spotify, where basically higher bitrate is better, and the bitrates are as follows.
Low: Approximately 24kbit/s
Normal: Approximately 96kbit/s
High: Approximately 160kbit/s
Very High: Approximately 320kbit/s
Now, we need to make sure we have the highest bitrates possible, basically very high. To do this we need to Go to Settings > Wifi Streaming > Set to Very High.
Also, modify the downloads as well. Go to Settings > Downloads > Set to Very High.
For Cellular Streaming, you should tweak it to taste, it will depend on your internet plan.
2. Set Normalization to Off
Audio normalization uses a limiter to level out the volume of your songs. Yes it is very convenient to use and for some scenarios you want to turn it on, however, if you want the utmost sound quality, you should turn it off.
Go to Settings > Normalize Volume > Turn it Off
3. Use Your Equalizer
Spotify has an equalizer setting available and it’s something you can use to tweak your sound signature to taste. Listening to some EDM or Hiphop? Boost that bass a bit. Listening to some Acoustic or Electric Guitars? Boost that treble. Etc.
Go to Settings > Audio Quality > Equalizer > Choose your Equalizer Setting
4. Download Your Favorite Songs
Even if you have the most stable connection, sometimes streaming still has the chance of not giving you 100% of the sound quality that you need. One way to solve that is to download your favorite songs to local storage. This is to ensure we have 100% of the Very High Quality all the time.
One way to do this is to create your own playlist, and put your favorite songs there and download. Another of course is just download your favorite existing playlist.
Of course, you would need Spotify Premium for this. I do think still this is well worth the subscription price.
5. Make Sure Data Saver is Turned Off
This is a new setting, but Spotify has a setting where it forces low quality streaming to save data. Just make sure you have that to off.
Go to Settings > Data Saver > Audio Quality > Off
Closing
That is it for my top tips to improve your sound quality in Spotify.
Of course this still doesn’t beat playing Lossless files in your favorite players, I still recommend that if you want max sound quality, and also other streaming services that offers higher bitrate like Apple Music, Tidal and Deezer, but still for people who cannot move away from Spotify curation ( like me ) this is your best option!
I Also Have a Video On It
