[anon23432343]

I played the same song from random services. They did not see the service nor the laptop. YouTube/Spotify/Apple/Tidal (We did not had access to more). YT usually was the worse followed by Spotify and then depending on the Genre either Tidal or apple won. All of them were in the highest settings.

Sony xm4 as headphones.

[earthnail]

The xm4 use Bluetooth and thus compress audio during transmission. Everyone of your listeners thus listened to lossy audio.

Fwiw there is not a single scientific listening test ever where participants were able to tell the difference between high bitrate mp3 and wav. Not even in perfect studio conditions.

[gen220]

Just curious, I have no stake in this, but did you have the "high quality audio" settings turned on for Spotify? I know they've had them in the past, I don't know what the specific name is for it these days.