YouTube Music Sounds Thin? Change This One Setting

The difference is not subtle on good headphones, and it is barely there on phone speakers.

Whether you can make the change at all depends on one thing, so it is worth checking before you go looking.

What the four settings actually are

Same four options in every place the app asks, with the same numbers behind them.

256kbps is the ceiling. There is no lossless or hi-res option on YouTube Music, whatever you are paying - more on that below.

Change it for Wi-Fi

1. Open your profile. Tap your picture in the top right of the YouTube Music app.
2. Go to Settings, then Data saving. On an iPhone it is under Playback and restrictions instead. Either way it is not called audio or sound, which is why nobody finds it.
3. Tap Audio quality on Wi-Fi. Pick High, or Always High if your network is steady.

It takes effect immediately - no restart, no re-login. Skip to a track you know well and listen to something with a lot going on in it.

Change it for mobile data

Same menu, different entry, and here the answer depends on your data plan rather than your ears.

1. Go back to Settings, then Data saving - or Playback and restrictions on an iPhone.
2. Tap Audio quality on mobile network.
3. Pick High on an unlimited plan, Normal otherwise. At 256kbps an hour of music is roughly 115 MB; at 128kbps it is about half that.

There is a Stream via Wi-Fi only switch in the same menu if you would rather the app simply never touched your data.

Set the download quality before you download anything

1. Open Settings, then Downloads and storage.
2. Tap Audio quality and choose Low, Normal or High.

What 256kbps actually gets you

YouTube Music does not use MP3. It streams AAC and Opus, both of which are meaningfully more efficient than MP3 at the same bitrate.

That efficiency is the reason the default is not as bad as the number suggests. 128kbps AAC is not 128kbps MP3 - it holds up considerably better, and on a phone speaker or cheap earbuds most people would not pick it out in a fair test.

Where 256kbps earns its keep is on equipment that can show it: open-back headphones, a decent DAC, a quiet room. Dense passages hold together, cymbals stop sounding like static, and bass keeps its shape instead of smearing.

It is a real improvement and a modest one. Anyone telling you it transforms your library is selling something.

There is no lossless option, and that may matter to you

256kbps AAC is the best YouTube Music offers. It is compressed audio, and no setting, plan or trick gets you past it.

If lossless is what you are after, it is the one thing YouTube Music does not compete on - Apple Music, Amazon Music and Tidal all include lossless tiers, and Spotify has added one. That is a reason to switch service, not a reason to keep hunting through menus.

For most listening, on most equipment, in most rooms, 256kbps AAC is not the thing holding your music back.

Squeezing more out of it on a Windows PC

If you listen at a desk, the room and the headphones are doing more to your sound than the bitrate is. Two Windows tools help with that - both are Windows-only, and neither has a macOS equivalent worth recommending.

FxSound, formerly DFX Audio Enhancer, processes everything your PC plays, browser audio included. It cannot put back detail the encoder discarded - nothing can - but it shapes what is there, and on flat-sounding laptop output that is a genuine improvement.

Equalizer APO with Peace is the precise version of the same idea. If your headphones have a known frequency response, you can correct for it directly, which does more for perceived quality than any bitrate change will.

Quick questions