Issue streaming Tidal MQA with iFi Zen Air Dac

Support
1

Hello guys,

I’m having an issue streaming Tidal MQA files, the audio keeps skipping and cracking when playing. I have an iFi Zen Air Dac connected to an old Mac Mini that acts as my Roon Server and have been using Roon for a few months, this never happened before. I’ve tried to restart the Mac Mini, with no use. I also have an iFi Go Link and used Tidal to stream the same song, and it worked flawlessly. Could you help me with this issue?

Best regards,
Pedro

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5

HI @PEDRO_MARQUES,
Thanks for reaching out to us about this issue. We’ve activated diagnostics on your account and a member of the team will be able to help you once this reaches their queue. In the meantime, if you want to do some troubleshooting on your own you can set MQA capabilities to none and just use the core decoder.

6

Hello, Daniel! I’ve done that (disabled MQA). I’ve enabled it yesterday and streamed an MQA, everything was fine again. That was before the update that I’ve just installed. Anyway, it would be nice to see what the diagnostics report.

7

Hi @PEDRO_MARQUES,

Thank you for your patience. Here’s what we’ve learned from diagnostics for the period during which you reported these symptoms:

  1. If there’s no transcoding or network dropout error presented by the UI or the DAC itself, then audible skipping and crackling with MQA can be an indication of a setting mismatch in an Exclusive control setting on the DAC. What mode do you have set on the iFi?

In logs, we can see that the processing speed on your RoonServer drops below 1x several times while the MQA decoder is working on Tidal tracks in MQA format by The Clash. Did you experience any audible artifacts while listening to that particular artist on March 24 or 25?

  1. If that is indeed the case, then the processing power available to RoonServer’s MQA decoder on the Intel Mac Mini is the vulnerability here. Do you have any DSP enabled in MUSE? I recommend disabling it in the meantime. We additionally have some performance improvements for background processes in RoonServer in the next release; these might help to decrease the frequency of the issues.

  2. Lastly, there are network timeouts in logs attempting to download content from Tidal’s servers. This is an upstream connectivity issue between the Nucleus and the internet. Is the Nucleus behind a managed switch that might be filtering upstream requests? Do you have any Quality of Service rules in place in your routers that might be limiting bandwidth to the Nucleus during periods of particularly heavy use, like when buffering an MQA file?

Thanks!