Spotify: how good is high quality streaming?

I've been looking all around to find a decent review that shows me how good is the quality of Spotify's "High quality" streaming. No luck, so I'll do one.

CD RIP (flac)

This is the spectrum and wave of the original, 1996 CD version:

320kbps MP3 from CD RIP by ffmpeg

spectrum, 320kbps MP3 from
CD — spectrum, 320kbps MP3 from CD

wave, 320kbps MP3
from CD — wave, 320kbps MP3 from CD

Spotify high quality (desktop) streaming

( Recorded with audio-recorder[^3] into flac. )

spectrum, spotify high
quality — spectrum, spotify high quality

wave, spotify
high quality — wave, spotify high quality

Spotify normal quality (desktop) streaming

spectrum, spotify normal
quality — spectrum, spotify normal quality

wave,
spotify normal
quality — wave, spotify normal quality

Conclusions: high quality is still not CD, but is far ahead of the 320k MP3 output of ffmpeg.

(Oh, by the way: this entry was written by Peter Molnar, and originally posted on petermolnar dot net.)