Hi,
What are the best recommend settings for dragonfly cobalt? “render only” or should I select “decoder and render”?
Thanks!
For devices recognizes by Roon the capabilities are known and the initial setup is done for you. At least I think that is true.
Mine was set with render only and I believe that is what I read in a review.
Welcome to the community.
Render only. The Dragonflies only support the rendering phase of MQA.
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Hi folks - am using the standard settings on my Dragonfly Cobalt. Get a clean lossless signal when plugged straight into my NUC or iPhone.
When I’m coming off my MacBook, I’m seeing another MQA renderer kick in rather than the Dragonfly ? Have followed the standard Audioquest and Roon setup for the device. Ultimately it still sounds perfectly fine, but am puzzled why I don’t get the same sort of signal path and pleasing purple icon ?
There are no settings to change on the Dragonflies they work as intended out of the box. Ensure you have mqa settings set to Renderer and core decoder is on. What your seeing is Roon reporting back what is happening. Mqa playback should always be blue never purple as MQA is not lossless and their is extra processing being done in the DAC for MQA content. The second image is showing what you should see all the time it’s showing the DAC performing the mqa rendering stage which is ORFS and not lossless in theory.
The first image looks like it’s not seeing the DAC as an MQA renderer , does the dragonfly light go mqa coloured on this when you play mqa content? Looks like Roon is not reporting it back which is right for iPhone as they don’t it’s a limitation of iOS. But it should with the NuC. Likely you may need to restart Roon or the NuC if you keep removing it. I had that some times with a nuc and it would not recognise the DAC properly when it was hot swapped.
Excellent - thanks Simon. On my Mac, I do get the purple light on the device (also same via Nuc and iPhone).
So basically you are saying that the device is correctly handling MQA on the Mac, and the signal flow is more correctly indicated, when compared to Nuc and iPhone ?
Yes. The NuC however should report it correctly and show the same as the Mac, I take it your using ROCK, I would reset the settings for it when you plug it in to see if they rectifies it.
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