Perfect! Hope MQA (company) will accompany this idea.
Yes sure understand, but to have MQA certification included in Roon certification makes it unnecessary to change to an MQA DAC when you have none, but Roon. Great, hope this works out (subject MQA proofs to be a step forward in SQ).
Will there be a released list of either MQA-certified or Roon-certified DACs? Or will we all have to buy new DACs?
I guess Iâm still confused what a Roon-certified DAC is, since it already works with my DAC (Marantz 8115). If bits are bits, are the bits going to change somehow?
Thanks for the clarifications Danny. This is the way many of us were thinking and hoping it would work but we got thrown by the Auralic mess.
The lack of clear simple information on just how this is going to work and be rolled out for the end user from MQA themselves is causing a lot of confusion. Sounds from your experience with Meridian this is not likely to change anytime soon 
Sorry, English is not my native language, but could I understand that the ultimate Roon MQA support would look like a dropdown list over various DACâs available?
And it is the DAC chip, not the whole DAC unit itself? Meaning manufacturer, model,etc.
Edit:
Or even better, choose chip, and all available DACâs using that chip shows up 
A Roon Certified USB DAC is one that we have validated and test in-home as working properly in all respects, and when issues arrive, we have the gear as well as the support of the company to fix the issue.
@R1200CL: The UI would be non-existent, other than in Signal Path. We would just do the proper thing with the right endpoint DAC.
Continuing the discussion from MQA support by Roon:
Roon will know my DAC ? Even if was using Auralic or a Squeezebox Touch as streamer. How ?
I must be missing something, or maybe the spdif is a two way protocol.
The slogan for my DAC manufacturer is âDigital Done Rightâ. Roon seems to fit that statment also very vel
Iâve wondered how this and things like room correction would work with multiple endpoints in different locations playing different things or even the same things and requiring different corrections or maybe MQA decoding at the same time. How does this kind of thing work within the Roon architecture? Is room correction and MQA decoding best done in the endpoint where Roonspeakers resides? I think I saw that @Brian said he did not like this sort of architecture somewhere in some HQPlayer discussions. So would the core have to run several different processing streams at once for each specific endpoint?
We want the endpoints to be lightweight, cheap (no patents), and not electrically noisy.
Doing as much as possible in the Core helps that goal.
Interesting. So would we manually tell Roon what our DAC is, or would the endpoint need the capability to detect it?
Interesting. So would we manually tell Roon what our DAC is, or would the endpoint need the capability to detect it?
That is MQAâs decision, and more about how they make the rules. It is not possible to detect DAC models in 100% of cases, since manufacturers often re-use USB identifiers across multiple models. Also, ASIO doesnât contain a mechanism for conveying model informationâyou can figure out the manufacturer of the driver, but thatâs about it. Nor does S/PDIF for that matter.
In the situations where itâs possible to do precise identifications, Roon is positioned to do it, including in situations where a RoonReady streamer with a USB port is involved (these devices are already sending back USB IDs for the DAC to Roon, but we havenât had a use for them yet).
Iâve wondered how this and things like room correction would work with multiple endpoints in different locations playing different things or even the same things and requiring different corrections or maybe MQA decoding at the same timeâŚ
Right now (meaning as Roon stands today in production), all linked endpoints get the same stream.
I expect that we will fix that limitation at the same time as when we release the first DSP enhancement features. Basically everything we are thinking about (MQA decoding, room correction, headphone processing, up-sampling, and EQ) wants to be configured in an endpoint-specific manner.
It would be highly-desirable, suffice to say, to allow people to manually configure the DAC model. While auto-config would be nice too, itâs trivial to figure out which DAC chip a device is using if that doesnât work for some reason.
I agree completely. I hope MQA sees it the same way.
@brian. It is possible instead of identifying the type of USB-DACs, why not Roon gives user an option to:
A. Decoding MQA in the Core and output PCM to a non MQA certified USB-DAC(as long the DAC can support the highest sampling rate available) Or
B. Stream out native undecoded MQA to a MQA certified USB-DAC.
If user set it wrongly, undecoded MQA can still playback without the fold back resolution in A.
MQA (the company) determines the conditions under which MQA (the technology) can be implemented. These are good ideas, but itâs impossible for me to comment on what Roon might/might not do until we know what the rules are going to be, and that ball is not in our court.
We want the same things that you do: access to MQA for our users under the widest set of circumstances/configurations possible.
I imagine that the MQA portion of this would be a quantification of certain DAC parameters (eg pre/post ringing, etc) for MQA to adjust the decoding? So Roon would have a list of known and profiled DACs? Or would it just be telling MQA which, of the prob many profiles applies to a particular DAC?
I suppose the real question is whether âMQA certifiedâ means hardware decoding within the DAC or simply to have a profile of the DAC within MQA.
Apologies for sounding thick, but do we have an answer to what I believe is a fairly simple question, i.e. will ROON be capable of software decoding of say MQA streamed from Tidal, such that it can then send itâs 24/96 file across to my existing Meridian end-point, or will I need to actually buy hardware?
@Danny, can you please confirm either way?
Hi Mike,
Danny and the devs (I totally shotgun that band name), may be constrained as to whether they can tell us anything further from what is set out above. I think it is fair to say things are in a state of flux. Roon is in discussion with MQA and may be arguing that it is a special case. In those circumstances the devs may be wary about creating any expectations among users. If there are things they can tell us for sure, then they will.
My take on the probabilities is as follows:
It is likely that Roon, Tidal and Auralic will be able to implement a software decoder that can send a 24/192 kHz decoded MQA to a non-MQA DAC. If so, Roon can downsample that to 24/96.
I think that is likely because the alternative of pure end-to-end hardware that would require everyone to get a new DAC seems non-commercial and no one, even at MQA, could possibly have imagined that Roon and Tidal were DAC solutions. Naming them as MQA partners presumably meant something.
It is possible that such a software decoder will be generic and not implement all the ADC/DAC correction that is used to achieve 10ms time distortion. That would create two levels of MQA: generic and full. MQA may decide that they donât want to do that.
It also seems possible that such a software decoder could implement the ADC/DAC correction if it knew what DAC it was connected to. Roon are a special case here because they are in a good position to know the endpoint DAC (at least with USB) and to configure for known DACâs which canât be detected by connection. Tidal, on the other hand, would seem to be in a different position.
We will be in a much better place to give clear and confident answers once things are finalized between Roon+MQA. As of now, we still donât have the final set of rules that will govern our usage of their technology, which makes it difficult to answer these sorts of questions.
Two thoughts: