Doubt about flac audio authenticity

[Ryyan23]

After some testing, I'm wondering if the downloaded flac audio file is legitimate from Tidal's servers or if it's just some kind of conversion. And I know that any kind of conversion will damage the audio quality. So is it a fake flac?

[redsudo]

I'm not sure what kind of response you want. You'll have to provide more details than that on what kind of "tests" are failing. This app does not convert any audio at any time. The source code is open so you can independently verify that however you like. If the flac coming from tidal is a transcode, then the transcoding is happening on their end and they are advertising and selling a false product.

[Ryyan23]

Ok man, thanks for the explanation. In the tests I made a simple comparison between sources using a spectrum analyzer and noticed some frequencies missing on some tidal tracks (some with a 19 kHz limit). I can't verify the code because I'm not familiar with Python or any other programming language. By my ears I can notice some kind of difference in this. As if the tidal player was trying to "improve" the track signal, causing a difference between him and the playback on normal players like VLC and foobar2000. But I guess this issue is explained in this article: https://community.roonlabs.com/t/heres-an-explanation-of-why-tidal-through-roon-sounds-better-than-tidal-natively-testing-for-dsp-and-alterations/72848. So see what you think.

[19h]

It's also possible that the artist upsampled a crappy file and submitted it to their music distributor, making it a de-facto shitty mp3 (or worse).

It would be easier to investigate this by sharing the respective artist.