How To Get The Best Sound Quality From Spotify & Apple Music

Long-gone are the days of suffering through inferior sounding audio quality just for the convenience of streaming music on your phone. With today’s data-heavy mobile phone plans, it’s easier than ever to ensure that you’re listening to music at the highest possible quality, at all times. By deviating from Spotify and other streaming services’ default playback and audio settings, we can significantly improve our listening experience.

While useful when trying to limit data usage or when internet connections are unstable, Spotify’s default settings ultimately lower the quality of audio being streamed and downloaded. This is especially noticeable when listening with wired headphones in a quiet environment.

Spotify caters to playlist listeners who may be taken aback by sudden jumps in volume from one track to another. Audio normalization makes quiet songs louder and loud songs quieter. Devout album listeners will likely want to preserve the original sound of the music they listen to as best as possible, regardless of differences in volume from track to track, or album to album. (When turned on the Loud setting, the audio compression used in Spotify’s normalization can even introduce artificial distortion, beyond what was intended by an artist.)

Disabling Spotify’s audio normalization setting plays tracks at their original volume. The dynamic range and warmth of soul records from the 70s will be maintained, while the harshness of 2010’s EDM tracks won’t be tamed.