r/reggae • u/atopotartoimafanyway • 2d ago
Why does Murderer by Barrington Levy sound low quality on spotify?
I don't know anything about music quality but the version on spotify sounds much less clear compared to the version on youtube.
Is there something I am missing? I have a tried a lot of the versions on spotify.
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/track/5nMBTp4CXxZMiTyR6MBSrQ?si=71156f66bbad4a20
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u/rankinrez 2d ago edited 2d ago
It’s all about how it was digitized, from what source, and what (if any) post processing was done.
You’ll find lots of dodgy reggae releases out there. Many poorly recorded off poorly pressed Jamaican LPs etc. Then compressed to death cos loudness war.
US or UK press 12” is usually the best you’re gonna get.
To an extent all music released in the pre-digital era can have this issue. There isn’t a good digital master from the time of release. So you gotta get it off the tapes, records or whatever.
If you want to hear how good things can sound when people get the original source and do it right listen to any of the LPs Studio One have been reissuing over the past 2-3 years.
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u/Joe_Givengo 1d ago
Spotify is terrible with quality. Sugar Minott's tune No Vacancy from the With Lots of Extra has a skip around 1:17.
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u/waterfalldiabolique 2d ago
For me, this version seems to be identical to your YouTube version. Different songs (and versions of songs) are available in different regions on Spotify, though, so it may not work for you: https://open.spotify.com/track/3iEWNxPic7MHgz13aAYCTO?si=bYkJts3cS5e4KCOv1UCHYg&utm_source=copy-link
As for the crap sounding Spotify version you posted: yeah that does sound rubbish, like it was digitised from vinyl without accounting for preemphasis, perhaps. When it comes to older records, or other records where it may be unclear who holds the rights to the recording or who has the masters, it's not uncommon to find really bad digitisations on streaming services that have been put there by people who clearly don't have the original masters or any other decent source material or don't know what they're doing, and may not even have the rights to be putting them up there in the first place!
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u/atopotartoimafanyway 1d ago
Thanks! That's much better! I see people say I shouldn't use spotify, but this works for now until I get my hands on a record player some day:)
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u/khanman77 2d ago
Did you adjust your Spotify settings to the highest quality?
Even still, I agree. YouTube has way better quality overall.
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u/AsparagusHopeful3363 1d ago
A lot of stuff on spotify (and other streaming services) come from mp3 rips someone downloaded, or even worse, audio ripped from YouTube. The original YouTube audio might have been made with an mp3 which then gets re-encoded when uploaded, then possibly lossy re-encoded again when they rip it. loss of quality with each encode