I have recently subscribed to the Premium Spotify service in the UK to test my recently purchased Yamaha Musiccast R-N602 network receiver.  Works very well and I am well pleased but I have noticed something curious.

The Yamaha displays what type of digital stream it is receiving and it states that it is receiving a PCM stream from Spotify?!? I thought that this might be due to transcoding at the Spotify servers to normalise track volume so I switched that off in the Spotify app but it made no difference.  So I can only conclude that Spotify is streaming in either lossless PCM or transcodiing a lossy stream into PCM (but that would make no sense, would it?).

I asked the Spotify help line for clarification but they only repeated the offical line that the highest quality Spotify supports is lossy 320kb/s.

BTW, I control the Musiccast receiver using the Musiccast app and Spotify on my Android phone but according to other posts that should not be a dependency as Spotify streams at the maximum quality to Yamaha Musiccast devices irrespective of Spotify app settings.

Thanks for any inputs.