Recent reports suggest SoundCloud has “drastically reduced” the overall audio quality of songs posted to its platform from 128kbps (MP3) to 64kbps (Opus).

While the bitrate has apparently been reduced, the newly employed Opus codec has been labelled by their developers as superior to MP3s at lower bitrates.

Pitchfork reached out to a representative at SoundCloud for comment and received this reply: “SoundCloud has not altered its approach to audio quality.”

They added: “We have been using the Opus codec (among others) since 2016, and we regularly test different combinations of encoding and streaming to offer listeners a quality experience on any device.”

It has been turbulent times for SoundCloud recently, in the summer the streaming giant laid off nearly half of its employees and shut down its offices in both London and San Francisco, it has also seen it’s founder Alex Ljung step down from being the company’s CEO.