'Play Store' music sounds horrible

[soccerballtux]

High Bandwidth Mode enabled, or downloading the entire album. What's up with that? Sounds like MP3 128kbps. I'm not buying through them anymore. Amazon sounds fine.

 

[Graze]

High Bandwidth Mode enabled, or downloading the entire album. What's up with that? Sounds like MP3 128kbps. I'm not buying through them anymore. Amazon sounds fine.

Sounds fine to me

 

[lothar]

There is something wrong with your ears.
Either that, or you're using some cheap ass headphones from the dollar store.

 

[sweenish]

Sound quality complaints on a phone. Heh.

 

[Zodiark1593]

Agreed, bought some classical 320kbs mp3 soundtracks and they sound quite butchered. The encoder is probably pretty craptastic. I've heard 120 kbs stuff encoded with LAME that sound much, much better.

I'm using Sennheiser Momentums myself.

 

[lothar]

Sound quality complaints on a phone. Heh.

I don't blame him though. He uses an LG G2.
LG by far has one of the worst sounds/speakers in smartphone hardware.

Samsung, HTC, and Motorola are miles better when it comes to sounds/speakers on a smartphone.
See AT review on the craptastic sound implementation on the Nexus 5 and LG G2 for reference.

 

[Zodiark1593]

I don't blame him though. He uses an LG G2.
LG by far has one of the worst sounds/speakers in smartphone hardware.

Samsung, HTC, and Motorola are miles better when it comes to sounds/speakers on a smartphone.
See AT review on the craptastic sound implementation on the Nexus 5 and LG G2 for reference.

If it's the built in speaker you're talking about, anything sounds like crap through it.

 

[lothar]

If it's the built in speaker you're talking about, anything sounds like crap through it.

Both headphone and speaker.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/7567/smartphone-audio-quality-testing/5

 

[soccerballtux]

I don't blame him though. He uses an LG G2.
LG by far has one of the worst sounds/speakers in smartphone hardware.

Samsung, HTC, and Motorola are miles better when it comes to sounds/speakers on a smartphone.
See AT review on the craptastic sound implementation on the Nexus 5 and LG G2 for reference.

I repeated with Nexus 5 to check.

other sources sound fine on both.

 

[soccerballtux]

If it's the built in speaker you're talking about, anything sounds like crap through it.

headphones

 

[Zodiark1593]

Both headphone and speaker.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/7567/smartphone-audio-quality-testing/5

The flaw anandtech pointed out primarily occurs at loud volumes (according to Anandtech, volume level 12 is the threshold) likely due to a weak amp. Hearing and headphones vary, but I keep the volume somewhere between 8 and 10. Unless the song is unusually quiet, anything above that is blasting level for me. However, when I connected the phone to the car stereo and cranked up the phone's volume to 14 or 15, the distortion was pretty evident. There's a bit of a balancing act between the volume on the phone and the stereo volume (the latter introduces hissing at higher volume settings). Admittingly, if you're using headphones that require more juice, the G2 is not up to the task.

My old Optimus 2x, however, is far, far worse where distortion is involved. Either I can choose hissing in the background, or horribly botched bass (among other things).

For my headphone use however, the G2 works quite well.

 

[gorcorps]

It's the player. You can EQ it a bit to help but Google's music player doesn't come anywhere close to the sound I can get out of poweramp.

 

[sweenish]

Agreed, bought some classical 320kbs mp3 soundtracks and they sound quite butchered. The encoder is probably pretty craptastic. I've heard 120 kbs stuff encoded with LAME that sound much, much better.

I'm using Sennheiser Momentums myself.

Fancy headphones mean jack squat when the DAC is subpar and the headphones can't be properly driven.

 

[soccerballtux]

It's the player. You can EQ it a bit to help but Google's music player doesn't come anywhere close to the sound I can get out of poweramp.

I found the MP3s it downloaded and listened to those, same problem. Same song on youtube? sounds fantastic

 

[gorcorps]

I found the MP3s it downloaded and listened to those, same problem. Same song on youtube? sounds fantastic

Oh really? Damn... that's a different problem than what I've seen. Good to know though.