Something that bothers me

Hello :sunglasses: This is NOT a rant, just an observation… and I may be full of s**t. I come here, we all come here, to audition/critique/enjoy each others creations. But what bothers me is that almost every cut is being streamed from one of the free services, and that invariably means it’s streaming at a relatively low bit-rate, typically 128kps mp3. The problem is, these lower bit-rate encodings uniformly sound like crap. This makes it hard to make valuable comments about the sonics and mixes. In all honesty, there are many songs here that I would gladly go ahead and pay a dollar or whatever to be able to download at a higher bit-rate so I could hear the real, best-quality version of them. I don’t claim to have golden ears, etc. anymore than anyone else, but I’m a bit surprised people write things like “sounds really good” about a streamed, lo bit-rate mp3 that I find sounds dreadful. I know I’ve posted about this before. I don’t have any particular suggestion, nor do I feel that this urgently requires any sort of remedy. But for me, I would want my music to be heard in the best possible context. I thought I’d just throw that out there :laughing: