So we start with bad news in 2018
As we know souncloud always lower the quality of your mixes and streamed in 128 kbps
so this days they change their bit rate to 64 kbps and well it sound weird the bass from tracks its like woody I dont know how to describe it, mids sound harsh.
What will happen in this year 
What does the community think about :
?
wow, hard to believe any kind of music platform would be willing to dumb down the quality this extent. am i naive in thinking that with the latest smart phones and 4G/5G bandwidth there is no need to reduce quality?!
You could always argue for lower file sizes in a world where we just ābloatā things because we can, but not at the expense of quality surely?
I am trying to push people more through to my YouTube now, which does mean creating a graphic/video too, but at least the audio is better. Maybe one for a Test Kitchen subject or even Graduates Club. I will bring it up on Mondayā¦
Soundcloud obviously had to deny that they were intentionally decreasing streaming quality. It looks like they were experimenting with different codecs (Opus) and promised improvements: https://www.billboard.com/articles/business/8092677/soundcloud-audio-quality-denies-decreasing-standard-tests
Itās comforting though, that they keep all uploads in the original format.
If this is true (at least for non pro customers) the reason behind should be to hardly reduce bandwidth / traffic costs for the service. Soundcloud was mainly getting known as a free Hoster of large audio files. But SC has to go shopping for IP bandwidthes too - as any Internet-User.
I dont know the numbers of their company in detail, but it should be hard to generate money with such a service today.
But it could be a feature too if they offer a player / streaming solution which really adapts the requested streams to a available bandwidth and processing power for each end user. There still are enough users on this globe and users in different usage scenarios which canāt exceed more then i.e. 56k - even on a theoretical 20 Mbit/s mobile link. This is something a typical web hosting is not capable of.
The Internet costs money - each transferred byte from one hop to another costs money and energy and the prices/costs are still higher then many of end users believe which only āknowsā their mix-calculated āFlatrateā products typically.
OMG! Thanks for letting me know. I was listening to my entry on Spinnin Talent Pool and was embarrassed about the bad quality and thought something was wrong with my upload.
/K