Is Spotify as good of quality as the HD-Tracks?

to your original question, hdtracks offers much higher resolution that spotify premium, which streams at up to 320kb and, i expect, would sound much better. however, i'm finding that even at the lower resolution spotify's sound quality is more than adequate--better than the late, lamented mog. i'm led to believe that the audio codec used by spotify (ogg orbis) preserves a wider range of frequency and sounds less compressed and more transparent at the same bitrates than comparable codecs.

Loomisjohnson,

I had MOG for years and kept it til the end. I immediately signed up with Spotify Premium and was surprised that it seemed to sound better than MOG. I don't know much about the different "codecs" but I like what I hear.

Do you have any experience with Beats...what codec they use and how it sounds in general?

I agree that Spotify seems to actually sound better than MOG. Spotify also seems to have much better selection of classical music and jazz than MOG which caused me to jump ship. Strange since MOG bills itself as being for audiophiles yet skimps on the two genres audiophiles most often listen to.

Taking the digital out of my iPhone into an external DAC makes Spotify sound fantastic on my home setup.

onemug, i did try beats for two weeks--like mog, beats streams "up to 320kb" mp3, although they use a different streaming protocol. alot of people complained that beats doesn't sound as good as mog did ("more compressed" and "artificial highs" being the common refrains). note that some of the criticism may have been during beats' beta testing, and may no longer be valid. personally , i didn't hear much difference between beats' and mogs' sq--beats sounded very good, and immeasurably better than, say, pandora. all that said, i am finding spotify's sq to be a little better on most genres (more detail, range), although the difference is subtle and one might easily prefer one over the other.

Loomisjohnson...Thanks. You are very fair in you in your observations.

Larrybou...Doing the same i.e.,iDevice>dock>dac and also streaming via Sonos>bridge>controller>dac. Sounds surprisingly good.