Oh it could be done (for an unambiguously identifiable Roon Ready or Roon Tested non-MQA DAC; and we have all of these devices in-house to test on), but therein lies the obvious problem: MQA licensing revenue.
I do not know how much MQA charges DAC manufacturers per unit and I have not been involved personally in the licensing negotiations with MQA but I’m willing to bet that you and I would be more than happy to pay a lot more than MQA’s per-unit hardware licensing fee. For example, I’d pay £100 in a blink to turn my Holo Spring into an MQA DAC. I’d probably pay £500 at a pinch. MQA could, in my view, make a lot more money out of this.
So… how much would you be prepared to pay to turn your non-MQA DAC into an MQA one (using Roon)?
Why not answer below? State your DAC and your price.
With my Hugo2, $0 to trial for 30 days but if I liked it, then happily $200.
To be honest though, I just want decoding to 96kHz with my Hugo2 - even Bob himself says there’s no music content above that first unfold. Once I have all the music content, then I’m happy to let the Hugo2 do it’s thing.
I’ve been trying A+ the past couple of weeks. Need more time to evaluate Tidal MQA stuff.
Yes, I had read that. Hope springs eternal (but truthfully, I’m not going to lose a lot of sleep agonizing over whether exaSound — and/or Roon — brings MQA compatibility to my listening room). For me, MQA is something that would be nice to have, not something I must have.
I’ve a suggestion, why not you guys work with MQA and come up with a ‘modular MQA plugins’ separately and use it to install along with Roon? I see this will help a lot; this shift the bulk licensing fee and cost to the end users instead Roon has to pay everything?
The ‘modular MQA plugins’ has an advantage of allowing how many endpoints, thereby end users will pay according to that.
If you’re talking about a hardware implementation, I would be willing to pay around 100$ to turn my chrod mojo into a MQA-enabled device. (Though I don’t think that’s possible.)
However, if you’re talking about a software implementation through Roon, then I’m not willing to pay for it, since Roon is subscription based. It should cover this. Roon is not cheap to begin with. TBH, I was sure Roon does this when I subscribed. I hope it will implement MQA support before my subscription expires. Otherwise, I will be considering the alternatives.
The first unfold is always device independent - ie universal. The subsequent rendering uses specific upsampling filters. The update to the Dragonfly allowed the controller to interpret the MQA spec for this filter and choose the appropriate settings in the ESS DAC.
But it is not unthinkable to use the MQA specification of upsampling filter (out of the first unfold) to determine specific “universal” upsampling filters in Roon itself. If we did this, we could, say, upsample to 358KHz with an MQA-determined universal upsampling filter, then have the freedom to apply dsp after that (eg eq or room correction). That would be my preference.
Yes, I am sure (I explained this above). All audio out directly via lightning audio (eg the apple headphones, the lightning-3.5 dongle, the Audeze Cipher cable) is limited to 48KHz/24bit.
When you connect a DAC via USB using the lightning-USB adapters, you’re not using the “lighting audio” interface, you’re using the “lightning USB” interface. This is the only way to go past that limitation. I believe a similar thing applies to DACs in Android phones.
It is a pretty niche market, there are not that many wackos like you or me walking around with such rigs.
I can understand MQA Ltd cannot get their eyes off of the honey pot of getting royalties for every step in the chain. But I will predict that if they don’t relax their requirements, it will be their demise.
@musicEar I have followed most posts (450+ ) but felt that there was a bit of speculation dressed as fact. Just trying to make sure we stick to known facts.
I see Joel and Andy have commented already so I think we are good.
You keep saying that but iOS is NOT limited to 48k.
Perhaps the lightning interface is, and perhaps the headphone output is, but the OS itself can handle much higher resolution files - as I point out, I can easily listen to 384k PCM and DSD256 by attaching a USB DAC and using a third party player.
In fact, the latest version of iTunes + iOS 11 Music will let you transfer and play 96k (at least) ALAC files without downsampling - not sure how it’s handling that internally, perhaps it resamples at play time to recognize the hardware limitations.
Again, perhaps the current output hardware is limited in some way, but the OS itself is not. So the idea that Tidal on iOS could offer “first unfold” capabilities is not out of the question, even if an external DAC is needed to take full advantage.
) but felt that there was a bit of speculation dressed as fact. Just trying to make sure we stick to known facts.
but iOS is NOT limited to 48k.