im not from pandora but if i had to guess the only obstacle is cost. seeing as much of this music is streamed not downloaded for offline listening the company has to be mindful of everyone's ability to continue using their service. thus an increase in quality would "require" an update to their software to change the current bitrate to medium and the new higher bitrate as high quality. or leave the current as high and make a very high or whatever. probably not super hard to do but that will have a cost. a secondary expense is going to be servers that house the music. If they have the data in house on a single server location in one spot in the world that is at 80% 80% whatever capacity going to a higher bit rate would require likely double if not more equipment to handle the new load. If they have multiple in house servers they would have to double the equipment in all of them to offer the increased bitrate worldwide. If they are instead in a cloud based setup they wouldn't have to buy physicals hardware but instead pay for additional capacity from their cloud based partner. Lastly regarding improving audio quality the answer is yes sort of.... Assuming the bit rate is the only limiting factor on audio quality. The main factor on sound in all reality is going to be speakers. if you are listening on your tiny smartphone speaker regardless of bit rate its going to sound bad because of the speaker. same with any sort of slim device such as TVs, low quality earbuds etc and while not as bad but somewhat any smaller speaker setups like amazon echo, midrange headphones or high end earbuds will have their limits as well. Assuming speakers aren't the problem you can also have compression on your source and or internet connection. Bluetooth for example has limits on how much data can be processed depending on the source unit as well as the bluetooth version of the audio device. so playing CD quality wont matter if the transmission source cant handle that data and thus compresses to a lower quality bitrate anyway. in the US since net neutrality was abolished ISP's can and do put caps on data transmissions. i have none done research on if audio is impacted but for example im on an unlimited plan from verizon and have limits on video quality. so depending on if theres network congestion or if we have reached a threshold of data per month or if someone at verizon is having a bad day that quality can be limited by the ISP even if the source has higher quality available. again not sure if this comes into play but it legally could.
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