[tursiops]

Hi all,

I received my tangara recently and I have a selection of different quality music, some mp3, some flac and some hi-res flac. My issue is that I can't hear the difference in quality between those. I know that you shouldn't listen to anything above sampling of 48Khz, but I checked and my hi-res flac is 44khz. 
I'm using focal celestee headphones: Celestee - Closed hi-fi headphones | Focal as well as in ear custom fitted earsonics: EM6 | in-ear monitors | EarSonics ® with both I hear the same quality with all these different formats. 
I know it is not a fair comparison but I listen to those same files on my marrantz av receiver, the difference in quality is striking, I even did a little test taking the same song in mp3 and then flac and I can hear the difference.

Am I expecting too much from that little device or is there something that can be done ? Either configuration wise, hardware wise, or something else ? 

Thank you,
Tursiops.

[jacqueline]

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.