MQA and Bluesound

Thank you. Gonna use Roon as much as I can for the next 14 days during the trial. Hopefully Bluesound gets that update out.

This is completely incorrect. There is no long story, and there is no grandfathering. Your statement is FUD.

The Bluesound devices were granted Roon Ready designation because even though they do not do everything, they do the stuff that they do correctly, with no cheats or lies, and with the best UX/SQ possible. Signal Path will be transparent as to what is going on.

Since the time at which they were granted Roon Ready designation, they have been provided with the needed information to support MQA from Roon. This does not change their Roon Ready designation. When they add MQA-from-Roon support, they will not suddenly become more “Roon Ready”.

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Danny, its nice that you see things this way. Those of us who spent money on Blusound equipment thinking it was Roon Ready and could play MQA (unfolded) feel let down. My view is that Blusound is not completely Roon Ready as it does not support/execute the playing of MQA files via Roon.
If Roon designates that a device is Roon Ready, then it should be able to do all you can do, and Bluesound doesn’t get to the finish line.
We are patiently waiting on them.
Your site should have an asterisk next to their Roon Ready designation so that those wanting to enjoy MQA via Roon should not be unintentionally mislead.

Roon Ready does not mean “all the capabilities” of the device. It never has.

We try to keep this device matrix up to date with limitations, but things to fall through the cracks.

https://kb.roonlabs.com/Partner_Devices_Matrix

Same goes for Roon Tested.

Sorry, I thought I saw something like this from a Roon employee in another thread. Happy to delete my post. I thought the official Roon opinion was they would not be certified today. I think the words used were “historical wart”.

From a Bluesound Pulse 2 and Pulse Mini owner I am happy to state that they both work perfectly with Roon in every practlcle way.
If I link the zones in BluOS they show as one zone in Roon. If not linked like this they show as separate zones.
I can be playing in BluOS and then play from Roon and it takes over and vice versa. It’s all seamless.
The sound quality of the Bluesound units is excellent with or without MQA. I’m impressed


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Thanks for that Danny, happy to see this designation on the matrix is in place

@fritzg @BrianW

I’ll quote brian from that post:

Bluesound lacked the ability from Roon to do it right, because we were waiting for MQA to give us the pieces. As Brian points out, we certified them because it was no way for them to do MQA at the time, and we werent going to hold it all up based on the speed at which the MQA team moved.

Today, we would not have certified them, because we have the pieces for them to do it correctly. Removing certification after MQA delivered the pieces, would be a pretty crap thing to do. Instead we noted the limitation and told them they gotta do this, but we can’t set schedules on their end.

Other Roon Ready partners were in this situation too, and one has already fixed their situation (Lumin).

It should also be noted that they are not the only Roon Ready partner like this. Oppo for example, can’t DSD/Multichannel on their DSD/Multichannel-capable devices via RAAT due to the architecture of their product.

What can Lumin do that Bluesound cannot (in terms of MQA)?

Nothing – they got the same updated SDK at the same time. But obviously, they can do it faster. :slight_smile:

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they can fully unfold the MQA stream because they have implemented the new RAAT SDK. Once Bluesound does that, they will be able to fully unfold the MQA stream as well.

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Yep. I get it. That is the long story I mentioned that you took issue with. Sorry you were offended by the grandfathering comment. IMHO, there is nothing wrong with grandfathering, it was an easy to way to say you all certified them under a different set of circumstances. Again, sorry you took offense. It was not intended to stoke fear as you said, but to actually defend Roon and your process.

Roon is a great product, and I have been among the folks looking to get into the MQA space and still use Roon. I’ve had some upgrade dollars looking for a DAC or transport to land on. I was thinking of BlueSound, but they don’t seem to be able to deliver MQA compatibility with Roon. That’s too bad. I moved on to a space outside of MQA and bought an Allo DigiOne and saved some dollars.

Someday I may get an MQA DAC, but BlueSound lost a sale to me, because despite being Roon Ready, haven’t yet delivered the whole package.

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MQA was not added as an afterthought with the Lumin Roon Ready implementation. We started looking into how to do MQA over RAAT since 8 months ago.

Even before the SDK update became available, we already had a hack in place to enable MQA over RAAT:
http://www.audioshark.org/showthread.php?t=11388&page=7&p=198531&viewfull=1#post198531

Since the groundwork had already been done, it did not take much time for us to update to the new SDK.

For users of the products being discussed in this thread, please give your product manufacturer more time.

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So my bluesound devices are listed as having RAAT 1.1.15. Whereas my oppo 203 has RAAT 1.1.21. I’m guessing that when bluesound use a newer version of the RAAT protocol then the mqa files sent from roon will unfold correctly ? Sorry if that is what you said before

Great! I look forward to my T1 arriving soon

Mark,
If you asked your local dealer if the Bluesound products would fully unfold MQA music files when used in conjunction with Roon, and they told you “Yes”, then I would absolutely agree you should feel “let down” !

Of course, if the situation is different from what I described, then I might think your feelings are entirely unwarranted


I say this as a Bluesound/NAD dealer who has been completely on top of this issue from day one :wink:

Paul, the dealer had only a vague idea what Roon was.

Then the shame is on them, not Bluesound.

Granted, the vast majority of Bluesound buyers will have no inclination to purchase an additional $500 software product on top of their equipment investment. And maybe that is why your dealer did not understand what you were looking for.
However, as a seller of NAD Master, Bryston and Mark Levinson (which just released their Roon ready product), I would be quite remissed if I did not know ALL the “ins and outs.” A $500 Roon purchase on top of a $3500 Bryston or a $20,000 Levinson is an automatic! (a shameless and gratuitous patting myself on the back, sorry :slight_smile:

I have just returned from our industry’s Cedia show, where I grilled the Bluesound/NAD guys on just this topic. Be aware that they were quite early adopters to the MQA technology, and they quite honestly got caught in a situation where the method to detect MQA files has changed. It is going to require a non-trivial re-writing of code for them, but they have looked me right in the eye and re-confirmed their commitment to me to get this working as soon as they can.

It just may not be overnight.

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@paul_kraft, understanding the amount of work to achieve the optimal Roon/BluOS cohabitation, they are also suppose to be working on providing more “information” within the BluOS environment, which currently doesn’t provide any track information (resolution, etc) when playing Tidal within BluOS, was there any update on that?