[jkdufair]

It is indeed surprising to me that people can tolerate the low bitrate sound. I would consider subscribing but I can’t stand to actually listen. Do subscribers get a higher bitrate? My impression is that it’s a limitation of the satellite signal bandwidth and the number of channels they cram into it.

[on_and_off]

I have worked in the music streaming industry.

We did not try to cheat with bitrate but I am confident that only 1/100000 users would actually notice any difference between 128kbit/s and anything higher.

Even going lower than 128, you would be surprised how low you need to go before it really becomes noticeable to end users.