MQA on Arc Android Exclusive mode

Early Access
1

Is MQA supposed to work on Arc now?

My DAC does not see MQA coming through.

Signal path:

Screenshot_20221122-214023~2
Screenshot_20221122-214023~21644×3715 112 KB

If hip DAC, no purple light.

2

Turn off volume leveling.

EDIT: Never mind, not necessary.

3

Thanks for the suggestion, still no MQA though.

4

There is no MQA decoding yet not sure if its planned as it will need to happen on the phone. But if the DAC is a full decoder and renderer it should work if its passed bitperfect signal , but dongle dacs only tend to be renderers only so no it wont work as you need the decoding done first. Dont think the Hip DAC is a full MQA decoding and Rendering DAC.

All iFi audio DACs (excluding Pro iDSD Signature, NEO iDSD and iDSD Diablo) are MQA renderers only and therefore require software such as Tidal to perform the decoding. Whereas the Pro iDSD Signature, NEO iDSD and iDSD Diablo are decoders and renderers, therefore can fully unfold MQA

5

Ah, did not realise this, thanks for letting me know :slight_smile:

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6

Nothing wrong with MQA + Volume Leveling in Roon…

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7

So does ARC preserve the MQA signalling as volume levelling is done on the device not core and there is no MQA decoding which needs to be active to achieve this in Roon.

8

Yes, I have the same issue with my MQA Dongle DAC on iOS.
It is a Render and needs the Roon Core to undertake the 1st unfold decode before streaming to the ARC application.

Hence the Dongle DAC (Ztella) works with MQA content on an iPhone endpoint but not ARC running on the same phone, when ‘in network’.

What’s mad is I have full 24/192 & DSD via DoP support on ARC ‘out of network’ (and it streams fine over 4G/5G cellular) through the dongle DAC with the “original format” setting, which will be a higher bandwidth that the 24/96 with MQA signaling that the 1st unfold would generate.

So hopefully Roon can give us MQA unfold to an ARC based endpoint soon.

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9

My bad for not reading the 1st post fully. MQA is fully compatible with volume normalization when the decode is handled by Roon. That doesn’t exist in ARC right now. Doing any kind of volume normalization on the folded MQA file will, of course, break decoding of the MQA.

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10

I can get this working on my fiio btr 7 which is a full MQA device. Usb audio player pro and Tidal app will both output bit perfect MQA to the dac. For some reason Roon Arc appears to be able to output bit perfect but the DAC just wont see MQA.

11

Arc will not perform the first MQA decode stage your DAC needs to be a full MQA decoder and renderer. Also you need to ensure you’re actually playing full res files. The BTR7 looks to be only a a MQA renderer not a full Decoder and Renderer. UAPP and Tidal apps both perform the MQA decode stage so they will work as they clearly do.