I see that Roon puts Flac after MQA… I would really like to know what I am listening to?
A direct Flac?
A MQA converted to Flac?
A Flac converted to MQA?
The way it is presented is very confusing…
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MQA and FLAC are orthogonal things.
MQA is a format that is encoded in PCM data, which in turn can be packaged in either a WAV or a FLAC file. So, if you have a FLAC file, it can contain either a ‘regular’ track or an MQA one. In your case, it’s a FLAC containing MQA.
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If I understood your answer correctly, the original file was an MQA that Tidal converted to Flac?
I would use the term “compressed” to FLAC, and since FLAC is a lossless compression, you always get the original MQA back during playback.
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But this is rather moot, ultimately, as Tidal is/has removing/ed MQA files - replacing with FLAC only AFAIK
No MQA isn’t a file it’s an encoding process. MQA
Data can be packaged into flac or another audio container. The industry chose Flac as its free to use, widely supported and for streaming makes sense as it’s a smaller container due to its lossless compression system and can hold a lot of metadata. Roon just shows your the encoding and the container format nothing more.
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So when I see Flac… MQA showing in Roon, does that mean that Tidal hasn’t changed the file yet? Leaving it completely in FLAC. Because Tidal had said that they would end MQA at the end of July, so it seems that they haven’t finished yet.
They didn’t make the deadline, so they just don’t show „MQA“.
Please see the extensive discussion here, in particular the posts since the end of July when things were becoming clearer: