New MQA Signaling in Roon 1.5 doesn’t seem to be working with my Meridian Explorer² DAC.
If I turn off all DSP including Volume Leveling, the DAC decodes and renders TIDAL MQA files from Roon as expected, with all the blue/green/white lights in all the right places.
If I turn on Volume Leveling, the blue/green LED always stays white. 192k MQA files are only “unfolded” to 96k, according to the light show on the DAC.
Apparently Roon and the Explorer² aren’t quite getting along the way the release notes for 1.5 and the audio signal path display seem to indicate.
I am having the same issue with my Explorer (connected via USBridge) except that in my case the green/blue light stays off no matter what setting I use.
The capabilities of the Meridian gear is complicated and not always identifiable, so the Roon default is No MQA. You may have to set it right. Sounds as if you have it right, Roon passes the bit-correct bit stream to the Explorer which unfolds it and renders it.
Meridian gear doesn’t do rendering of MQA that has been unfolded in Roon. In this case, because Volume Leveling changes the bitstream and therefore breaks MQA hardware processing, Roon automatically takes over the unfolding to 96k, but in this case the Explorer can’t render it higher. Allegedly Meridian is working on adding the rendering mode.