Digital Drive

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I just got Tidal running and now playing with MQA

Posted by AbeCollins on May 12, 2017 at 12:06:36:

- The only way to get the full 24/192 benefit of MQA is with a MQA capable DAC.

- The Tidal player will do software decoding of MQA which gets you to 24/96. Still excellent.

- If you play a Tidal Master and do not have software decoding enabled it is still delivering a high quality 24/48 stream.... which is better than CD quality. Non Master streams (HiFi) are 16/44.1 which is the same as a CD.

I am presently playing music using the Tidal player in my office setup from my Mac Mini driving my DAC and the rest of my system. Here I am able to get 24/96 out of the Tidal MQA streams as the Tidal player software is doing the MQA decoding.

I can also use Roon with Tidal (Roon being the front-end interface to Tidal) and have the music streamed over the network to my basement system to the microRendu network streamer. In this scenario playing through Roon over the network, MQA is not decoded but I'm still able to get the benefit of "better than CD quality" via the 24/48 Tidal Master. I control it using the iPad that I take with me down to the basement. The iPad is running the Roon App as a remote control.

The article in Audiostream explains MQA decoding clearly at a very high level with a diagram that makes it easy to understand.