A little tale-telling of the mysterious MQA-rendering?

Roon Software Discussion
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Can somebody explain the thinking here?
It looks to me like Roon Core expands the 24/44.1 MQA authenticated track to 88.2. There was some explanation some time go that this is how the software expander is supposed to work.
But, then the Moon render in the 680D downsamples the content again?

Edit: I havent been able to make the Moon display, while doing Roon Ready, display anything other than track progress… So, the display doesn’t give away what resolution is being played…

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AFAIK, the MQA decoder will always “unfold” to 2 x the sample rate, including releases mastered at 44.1 kHz and 48 kHz.

Incidentally, ORFS means original sampling frequency.

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Agreed, thats my recollection also.
But, does that make any sense when the endpoint is listed (and configured as) both “decoder and renderer”? And still, does the Moon downsample again to be able to do the full decoding?

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I just made an edit… ORFS is a little like the MQA signalling stage, since it is simply confirming the original sampling frequency; it’s not resampling. The Moon MQA renderer is doing the “second unfold” AKA applying filters.

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What the MQA renderer does is a black box and is DAC dependant, maybe 2x , or 4x or higher overasampling. What gets reported back in this case is not necessarily what it’s doing it’s only the ORFs. It’s one part of the Roon signal path that’s not as accurate as one might want it to be as the DACs often will only report back what the ORFs is its which also adds to the confusion. My SMSL does this so god knows what it is overasampling to internally.

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Thanks guys!
I’ll simply consider the ORFS a flag, confirming the authenticated sample rate! :slight_smile:

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That is all it is, meta-data. No connection to actual on going processing at all.

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