This is from Pandora’s website
Premium subscribers:
We offer three audio quality options for Premium subscribers:
- Low: 32 kbps AAC+
- Standard: 64 kbps AAC+
- High: 192 kbps mp3
https://help.pandora.com/s/article/Audio-quality?language=en_US
I’m always amazed at how few people understand bitrate. These bit-rates may be OK for a phone with a pinhead size speaker. Their high bitrate 192 kbps is an absolute joke. That was a high bitrate 15-20 yrs ago when hard drives were measured in Mega bites 32 & 64 are ok for audio books ...maybe.But I’m not sure that is even used today. .
Consider this. A typical 3 minute song in a WAV file (a duplicate) will be about 30 mega-bites. A 192 Kbps rip of that file will be 3 at the most. That’s 1/10th the size of a copy. What happened to the other 27 megs? Its gone along with all that information. It sounds awful on any system that has any resolution. But its OK for the pin head size speaker in the phone which has no resolution anyway
An Mp3 is similar to a paragraph written without the vowels &/0r consonants. Yes, it can be read. but it wears out your brain from all the translating. The same is so with Mp3. it wears your brain out. Its called listener fatigue A bluetooth speaker can help but the 27 megs are still missing from the music when listening to Pandora’s "High Quality" IOW, you are hearing 10% of the music...just as Neil (Young) said