Over Compression of Higher Frequencies

[jmwoelkE]

Anyone else noticing REALLY aggressive and random gate like compression of higher frequency on some songs and others sound fine?

Seemed to start happening last week and it's so aggressive that it's really distracting. Seems to be most apparent on hi hats. The hats come through, but it's like someone is turning a knob up to allow each hi hat through but it's always a random rates/speeds and sometimes it obliterates a random hi hat all together. 

I know I'm being a bit picky here. I've been able to hear compression on Pandora since day one, but's it gotten particularly bad. Listen to "Come and Get Your Love" by Redbone. Every chorus the hi hats are cutting in and out and then during the verse they almost completely disappear. This song sounded fine three weeks ago and now it sounds like a horrific late 90s ripped MP3.

The ads always sound great.... 

[cobryan05]

I'm hitting something like this. It's awful. Things I've noticed:

* It only affects one of my computers

* On this computer, it only affects playback in Pandora website, in Chrome

    * Using Chrome to playback the exact audio file that Pandora.com's player downloads sounds fine

    * Using Pandora.com's player in Edge sounds 'fine'

     * Using Pandora.com's player, on Chrome, on this one specific computer, produces a spectrogram like this:

Frequencies above 9.8khz are being filtered somehow. Then, when on the onset of high energy in the upper bands, *250ms later* it allows a few of those frequencies to screech through.

I'm pretty convinced it's some sort of driver-level issue on the specific computer... although I just started a 'free premium trial' to be able to replay the same song across multiple situations... and uh, the issue significantly reduced in Pandora's player during the premium trial. Here's some snippets from the same song:

Chrome, Non-Premium:

Chrome, Premium-Trial:

We're getting a lot more over 9.8khz when we are in Premium Trial mode.

But take a look at playing a song in Edge (not same song, couldn't get to it in number of free skips)

Edge gets *much better* audio quality.

I don't know what the conclusion is.  It doesn't seem to affect all computers, but the ones that it does affect seem to be Pandora Player's fault, and it improves significantly if you have Premium. But to really get audio above 9.8khz, switch to Edge.