SoundCloud rejects claims of reduced sound quality on its streams

SoundCloud is still the place to be for budding and established music makers, and it's fair enough that they won't budge on sound quality.

Since Wednesday, the company has been on the receiving end of users bemused and angry over a purported change to the format it streams music in.

It's apparently switched from 128 kbps MP3 to 64 kbps Opus, an open source format developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation, leading to headlines and tweets about it "halving" its sound quality.

According to its developers, Opus seeks to meet or surpass the audio quality of MP3 and other proprietary codecs like AAC, especially at lower bitrates.

In simple terms, Opus aims to achieve high audio quality at smaller file sizes, which is especially handy (and cost-efficient) for streaming. Here are listenable examples of the difference between Opus and MP3 here.

A SoundCloud spokesperson explained via email that reports of lower audio quality "are inaccurate" and that it "not altered its approach to audio quality."

"We have been using the Opus codec (among others) since 2016, and we regularly test different combinations of encoding and streaming to offer listeners a quality experience on any device," the spokesperson added.

"Furthermore, we store all content from creators at its originally uploaded quality level so we can continually adapt to advances in encoding and playback."

One Twitter user, Direct, speculated SoundCloud could be using an earlier version of Opus, leading to decreased audio quality. He's released an extension to make SoundCloud revert to 128 kbps MP3 streaming instead of Opus.

SoundCloud said it doesn't "disclose specific codecs or versions we're using at any given time, on any given device as it's proprietary information." 

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Anyway, here's a fun little test to see if you can actually see how well you perceive sound quality.