Since I have the Mark Levinson upgrade in my car, I want to make sure I take full advantage of it, so I decided to do an apples-to-apples comparison between Spotify and Apple music. I made sure both were set to their highest quality settings:




But quite honestly, it was hard to tell the difference. Both sounded great.

Does anyone have any recommendations on songs or methods I can try out to ensure a better comparison? Or am I just not that sensitive enough to audio quality that Spotify really will just be good enough for me? Really curious about this.

 

Try the free trial of TIDAL and Amazon Music Unlimited.

From their site-

WithAmazonMusic Unlimited, you get all of the great features and functionality of Amazon Music Prime…and a lot more. Amazon Music Unlimited offers 90 million songs in lossless HD quality, millions of tracks in Ultra HD. Amazon Music Unlimited also offers a growing catalog of spatial audio content mastered in Dolby Atmos and 360 Reality Audio. Non-Prime customers pay $9.99/month.

 

From my understanding, Apple is one of the, if not the, best streaming services for lossless compression due to their ALAC codec. So I don't think it's Apple Music that's the issue.

 

I have an Apple Music subscription too. I've never used spotify. I should have clarified that I was suggesting a few more sources to add to your testing pool. I've never directly compared any services back to back as I have had experiences with most of them. I felt like Tidal was too expensive for my needs but a tremendous source for quality, possibly the best! Amazon M.U. is one of the best bangs for your buck with impressive sound and variety. My Apple Music trial is part of an Apple ONE bundle from buying Apple products. You can download a free sampler from HDTRACKS to test and there are plenty here that have done that and been impressed. At the end of the day, the service I would likely pay for when my various trials end would be Amazon M.U.

 

The problem would be if you are using your phone to stream via BT to the car. Of course, there are higher audio providers (Amazon HD / Tidal / etc). If Apple or Spotify's audio quality exceeds the limitation of the phone's DAC, it will always sound the same. Not only higher quality audio is required but higher DAC quality is necessary. Also in some cases streaming via BT is a whole other can of worms.

There is a recent prior thread on this and I have suggested a recommendation which actually made the system sound better. Bear in mind, since the M/L audio is already good to begin with, the cost vs. returns although noticeable, is slight.
https://www.clublexus.com/forums/es-...nd-system.html

 

Yeah big reason why I might switch regardless is due to the Apple One bundle since I'm already subscribed to their cloud services. Haven't really looked into Amazon's service, but I might look into it when my Apple Music trial ends.

I came across that thread in the past, but I don't recall seeing a good way to do an apples-to-apples comparison. I was using wired CarPlay while testing though, not Bluetooth. But I feel the truth of the matter is that the ML system is just so good that it really doesn't matter. But I'll go ahead and read through that thread again and see if I can pick anything else up from it.

 

I have both apple and Qobuz and pushing 24/192 though wired I can’t tell. Honestly just use CD if you want the best out of the ML but most of the time I do Apple Music

 

To compare the 2 different music formats, select the highest quality music source and make sure that you have the proper audio settings. In addition to the thread mentioned above, see this thread:

https://www.clublexus.com/forums/es-...endations.html

In post #1 of this thread, I list a few of the high quality music selections that I use.