I believe Apple is throttling the Spotify app bandwidth

[jhuston4]

I'm not exactly an audiophile but my hearing is quite good for details especially at the higher frequencies. I ended up cancelling Sirius/XM because they throttled bandwidth as they took on more channels. I could even tell that they throttled first on the metal channels - obviously metalheads don't need high quality /s. Anyway, I switch back and forth from apps like tune in and Spotify and the difference is noticeable. It manifests mostly as loss of stereo separation and increased harshness around 8 khz. Again, I'm no expert, but detail is lost at the higher frequencies first when bandwidth is reduced. I have checked all settings on Spotify and have played with the app's equalizer with no reasonable improvement.  Playing spotify through a browser provides better quality.   This appears to have happened in the last month or so. Is it possible Apple is downgrading performance on a competitive app?