Assuming either of those things were true, do you think we’d air that sort of thing publicly?
1.3 has been out for one week, and with it, a disproportionately huge number of new users trying Roon, and a huge amount of product feedback and discussion on this site. Supporting all of these people is consuming a lot of time and focus. This happens with every major release. The dust is just beginning to settle over here.
You’ve been around here long enough to know we don’t put time estimates on anything, but especially not things that involve other companies.
In terms of new features coming, MQA software decoding is our top priority. It’s a top priority for MQA too. We want the same things you do, and we are well aware of the massive demand for this feature.
Even if Roon were to implement MQA in future builds, software decoding can only do up to the first fold back to 88.2/96k. The second (176.4/192k) and third fold back (352.8/384k) will only happen in hardware decoding inside the DAC. So in the end, to get the ‘best decoding’ out from MQA, you need to ditch your existing DAC and buy a MQA DAC.
However, there’s sunny side to it. Since the nature of MQA decoding (some lossy above 22kHz) is likely to contain most of information in the first fold back, e.g at 88.2/96k, second and third fold back are basically just up sampling. So I think the first fold back happens at 88.2/96k in software decoding should be more than enough to capture all the information above 22kHz.
I am looking forward to MQA streaming in Roon, and maybe it will take off with other labels supporting it, but as I am currently listening to a 24/192 version of Ella singing the Duke Ellington Songbook on a non-MQA DAC I can’t imagine it being much better. I’d rather have ROCK than MQA.
Yes, but you still need those ‘hardware renders’ example like dragonflys to have its firmware updated to support MQA, Otherwise it just behave like a ‘pass through’ device. Due to the maximum capped of dragonflys at 96kHz, this is as far it can go. If you use Mytek Brooklyn DAC, this DAC actually built full MQA hardware decoding and can fold back to 352.8/384k.
Are you sure? When I set JR22 as my output in Tidal it shows up as 88/96 when playing MQA. If I choose pass-through option in Tidal then all comes out 44. I would think that it is unfolding if I see 88/96??
Good on you Brian - that’s the first time I have heard you be stroppy ! We should all be patient in the light of the release of 1.3 and the timeline for MQA implementation is not in your hands entirely