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.

Then everyone needs to download and make an account on said app, they already exist and none are unanimous.

Everyone has a phone number that gets used for auth and other things. If that system doesn’t change then RCS is way better.

Never looked into it, what’s so bad about RCS besides it being proprietary? Way better than SMS in my experience.

RCS seems to be pretty openly licensed out to other OEMs, definitely a lot better than iMessage.

It’s still proprietary though, a far cry from something like Matrix.