Actually, RDIO has never been forthright about what quality they stream in.
From their customer support in their knowledge-base:
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"We're not currently providing specific bitrate or codec information. We experiment with different rates and encoding formats in an effort to provide the best possible listening and user-experience, and stream CD-quality audio over the web and wifi (for mobile devices), and only stream a lower bitrate if you’re on a 3G connection.
We realize that is not be as much detail as you’d like, and we apologize for this — if you have feedback about Rdio’s sound quality as you're listening, please do let us know."
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Comments
In terms of sound quality, Rdio streams at 192 kbps and Spotify Free at 160 kbps.
Actually, RDIO has never been forthright about what quality they stream in.
From their customer support in their knowledge-base:
-------- "We're not currently providing specific bitrate or codec information. We experiment with different rates and encoding formats in an effort to provide the best possible listening and user-experience, and stream CD-quality audio over the web and wifi (for mobile devices), and only stream a lower bitrate if you’re on a 3G connection.
We realize that is not be as much detail as you’d like, and we apologize for this — if you have feedback about Rdio’s sound quality as you're listening, please do let us know." --------
Looking at network flows from rdio servers reveals that the mp3 chunks are actually 192 kbps.
That's bitrate, which doesn't necessarily correlate to "sound quality". Vorbis at 160 kbps usually sounds better than MP3 at 192 kbps.
Okay but Spotify premium streams at 320kbps all ogg vorbis.