2025-07-21, 05:52 AM
Hi!
It's very difficult to say much about what might be going on here without a lot of very detailed information about the files involved, and your particular testing circumstances. Audio quality is an extremely subjective topic, and in general the sets:
- Audio quality differences that are theoretically perceptible
- Audio quality differences that a specific person perceives
- Audio quality differences that an audio device manufacturer will try to sell you on
are overlapping but not identical.
What I can say about Tangara is that our device's output has a flat frequency response (unusually so IMO; especially at the low-end), and a relatively high noise floor. I can also say about Tangara that the decoders we use are generally reasonably mature and well-used, and that we don't do any kind of additional EQing of the decoded audio. We do introduce a dither when playing back sources that decode to great than 16 bits per sample, but that's probably not going to be super relevant here.
This is all a long way to say that personally I believe that Tangara's output should be accurate. Any audible difference between properly encoded MP3s and Flacs should be quite minor, because in practice the quality difference between the two formats is not *that* big of a deal. You can learn how to listen for it, but it's usually not a dramatic difference.
I can't speak to anything your high-end receiver may or may not being doing. If it sounds better to you and you enjoy it, then IMO probably best not to worry about it too much and just enjoy the sound.
It's very difficult to say much about what might be going on here without a lot of very detailed information about the files involved, and your particular testing circumstances. Audio quality is an extremely subjective topic, and in general the sets:
- Audio quality differences that are theoretically perceptible
- Audio quality differences that a specific person perceives
- Audio quality differences that an audio device manufacturer will try to sell you on
are overlapping but not identical.
What I can say about Tangara is that our device's output has a flat frequency response (unusually so IMO; especially at the low-end), and a relatively high noise floor. I can also say about Tangara that the decoders we use are generally reasonably mature and well-used, and that we don't do any kind of additional EQing of the decoded audio. We do introduce a dither when playing back sources that decode to great than 16 bits per sample, but that's probably not going to be super relevant here.
This is all a long way to say that personally I believe that Tangara's output should be accurate. Any audible difference between properly encoded MP3s and Flacs should be quite minor, because in practice the quality difference between the two formats is not *that* big of a deal. You can learn how to listen for it, but it's usually not a dramatic difference.
I can't speak to anything your high-end receiver may or may not being doing. If it sounds better to you and you enjoy it, then IMO probably best not to worry about it too much and just enjoy the sound.
