{"componentChunkName":"component---src-pagination-blog-posts-by-category-js","path":"/category/audio","result":{"data":{"allMarkdownRemark":{"edges":[{"node":{"excerpt":"<p>Last year, SoundCloud upgraded its AAC encoder for the first time in over a decade. The new one (Fraunhofer’s libfdk_aac) delivers higher perceptual audio quality across every metric we track.</p>\n<p>But if you look at a spectrogram, you may notice something unexpected.</p>\n<p>Here’s the scenario: you upload a lossless master. You download your track from SoundCloud and open it in a spectrum analyser. There’s a hard shelf at 17 kHz where there used to be energy all the way to 20 kHz. The old encoder kept…</p>","fields":{"slug":"less-is-more-why-soundcloud-low-passes-its-aac-transcodings","teaser":null},"frontmatter":{"date":"June 18th, 2026","title":"Less Is More: Why Audio on SoundCloud Looks Different","categories":["Audio","Engineering","Transcodings","Streaming"],"authors":[{"name":"Joe Reid","link":null}]}}}]}},"pageContext":{"isCreatedByStatefulCreatePages":false,"limit":10,"skip":0,"currentPage":1,"numPages":1,"basePathName":"/category/audio","category":"Audio"}}}