David Elias - free MQA sampler not showing as MQA?

Hello,
I’ve downloaded the following (free!) song:

I then choose .flac and .wav as download.
(Surprisingly the download didn’t even had a file format like flac or ALAC, was just called ‘track’, so I added .flac respectively .wav).

Adding .wav did not do anything, just made the song playable. same goes for adding .mqa.wav, just changed the name to track.mqa.

I then renamed the Flac download to track.flac (remember it was just a plain file called ‘track’ before)
this did also just made the song playable by ROON. Adding .mqa.flac as file type did do no change.

Both ways, the download was not shown as MQA

Recognizing MQA files works in general, I’ve tested it:

As this songs is available at no charge, might someone try this out, too?

Would be interesting to see if anybody has the same results.
Could it be that this is not an original MQA file, just a remaster, thus not showing MQA indication?

Does it Authenticate on your decoder? That’s the test.

It probably doesn’t have the correct FLAC tags.

You need an ENCODER (or ENCODEDBY) tag containing the “MQAEncode” string, and an ORIGINALSAMPLERATE tag for Roon to correctly ID the file as MQA.

4 Likes

Thanks for the explanation.
I checked the file tags within Roon and found no such statement within the David Elias files I’ve downloaded. Other MQA-files I have have such an ENCODER string, and are thus shown as MQA.
This makes me think if the file I’ve downloaded is MQA at all…

@Chrislayeruk I don’t have a MQA device (yet …) was just curious about the whole thing :slight_smile:

Thanks anyway, I think the topic can be closed.

The song gives the blue light when playing on my Mytek Brooklyn. It’s MQA file.

It does not show as MQA on my Bluesound node2. It merely shows as HD.

Do you play the song via ROON? According to this thread


it says “When sending the same file via Roon, right now there is not a way for an MQA indicator to be displayed.”

The blue light also comes on with my Meridian Exlorer 2.

Sorry, I should have been clearer. I was aware of the thread and indeed, my node 2 never displays the MQA logo via Roon, only directly.
In this instance, I connected directly, via the Bluesound app: no logo.

I purchased David Elias download awhile back and all the tracks turn on the MQA indicator on my 808v6. There are several different rates up to 384k.