[iMore Question]

I was an original subscriber to MOG, (via the Internet landline) which was bought out by Beats, and of course, now Beats is owned by Apple. Starting about two months ago, I started noticing "pops" in my streaming music. This isn't "buffering" where the stream stops, but a slight "pop" or a sound in the music. I upgraded last year to AT&T's U-verse service and I get down 22Mbps most of the time, so I don't think my broadband service is causing these artifacts. I'm tempted to give up on Beats and try either Google Play or Spotify's paid subscription service, but I'm kind of bummed about having to do that because I've read blogs saying that the quality of the Beats stream is the best outside of Tidal's FLAC streams. Have you had any problems with pops or artifacts in the streaming music? I run my sound via an optical cable into a stereo receiver powering some decent Polk Audio bookshelf speakers and so I want the quality to be good and the music to be "clean". Could it be that the pops are in their encoded mp3 files? The reason I ask is that when I play the same song, they seem to be in the same place. If so, you'd think they'd get enough complaints they would re-encode the song. Thanks.