When I take it home, due to router limitations and ISP limitations, my connection is not nearly as reliable and consistent. My assumption is that at work (windows 7), our T1 line is so fast that bandwidth is never an issue - so audio quality is always the best. When your connection is terrible, or your bandwidtch drops, the quality ofy our media automatically adjusts and scales in a manner that appears to be diredtly proportional to your networks attributes.

Software is developed by companies to detect your network capabilities, and scale the quality of your media based on these factors. Youtube, netflix, pandora, and other streaming media companies are known to do this with media quality. My suspicion suggests to me that they vary bandwidth and therefore the audio quality of your playback. I suspect spotify limits bandwidth during times of high volumes of data transfer. I attempted all other solutions on this thread and the effect is still very noticable. Setting spotify to HIGH or realtime priority had no effect. I originally thought it was a priority issue. I have the premium membership and always felt this was a spotify issue because no other programs experience this effect. Even on my laptop (also windows 7) as well as my home pc (ubuntu) - this effect is noticable.

I have observed this effect on all systems I have run on with the exception of my work computer (running windows 7).

Volume changes up and down during all solng.

Why skype lowers game volume