Exciting news… Hopefully RoonSpeakers will be released at the same time.
They will show it at CES. But even though I am keen to get both asap, I do not expect a release next week.
But even if it might take a couple of weeks more, I am sure that we will get a great solution with high res from Tidal to Roon and from Roon to Aries. A scenario, we could just deam of a few years ago.
2016 will become an interesting year.
Indeed.
And thanks for posting this Anders! Was really happy to see it. Personally disappointed that the Aries Mini (which I have) will have to wait. But you can’t fault a vendor for prioritizing their top of the line products for getting new features. Honestly I’m happy that they appear to be implying that the Mini will eventually be made RoonReady. They could have easily decided to keep it in that Aries and the Aries LE only, just to get people considering a Mini to buy one of those instead.
It’s very important for Auralic to deliver on it’s promises now. The failure to implement Lightning DS for Android, after repeated assertions it was coming, was not a good look.
Just seen this link, which explains how the Auralic streamers will cope with MQA. They won’t be taking full advantage of it. Will have to wait for their DACs to become MQA ready for that.
Why will a software decoder not take full advantage of MQA compared to a decoder in a DAC ?
Because it just unpacks it to the original sample rate rather than all the other de-blurring that MQA can achieve.
Why can’t a software decoder deblur ? The deblurring sounds like some kind of apodising filter intended to correct blur introduced by the original ADC process perhaps also optimised for the DAC used in playback. If the software decoder knows what DAC it is connected to it could look up a table to optimise the filter for the relevant ADC/DAC combination. The table could be maintained online.
Certainly possible, but it doesn’t sound like that is their intention currently. I presume this is how it is going to work for mobile devices etc.
It’s just that I haven’t seen any hardware DAC manufacturers make claims for greater fidelity than can be achieved with a software decoder and it would seem natural for them to do so.
The “de-blurring” is a part of the core MQA process and will be realized by a software decoder. What may not be possible in a pure software decoding (to PCM say) will be the correction for timing and quantisation errors in the ADC.
Aries should fully decode MQA, no limitation
This doesn’t make any sense.
A 24/192 WAV file, assuming it is properly encoded, and assuming a high quality DAC, should not have any such issues. I don’t think MQA does anything special on the DAC side once decoded to the original PCM data stream.
Anyone at CES? Seen the Aries setup?
Part of MQA is packaging large sample rates in to a small file but a part of MQA is also about knowing what damage the DAC does to the signal in the conversion process. MQA wants to deliver analog to analog. I am admittedly presuming at this stage that the MQA implementation in the Aries won’t recognise what DAC will be dangled off the other end of it, and thus won’t be able to account for the damage that it is doing. I would love to be proved wrong!
My current assumptions means that you will get streaming efficiency for large sample rates using MQA in the Aries, which will be especially good for it as it can operate wirelessly, but those 44.1 tracks that get the MQA treatment, without the de-blurring part will have slightly limited benefit.
The Aries Mini however, with it’s inbuilt DAC could benefit.
I trust, that even if my guess is right now, in time the software and database of DAC information will change so that it is possible to deliver all the goodness.
Can’t be long now until some of this is all out in the wild anyway!
Are you sure about that? My reading of MQA is it supposedly addresses ADC limitations in the recording chain, not DAC limitations in the output chain. It would have to deal and adjust a huge number of DAC implementations if it did.