Ok I see now! You are correct, I was thinking JR was unfolding. So why can’t Roon see the 88/96 rather than 44/48?
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You’re confused… Unfolding means decoding the 44 to 88 or 48 to 96. So far, only the TIDAL native app can do this. JR, Roon, and any other bit-perfect player will pass along the 44 or 48 file data untouched (when run in bit-perfect mode), and if an external MQA DAC is used, it would unfold/upsample/etc in that DAC.
Until ROON gives us decoding of MQA files I wonder if they could give us some way to identify MQA files transfered over from Tidal. I assume that the MQA status must be in the metadata. Please ROON make this possible. Thank you.
What I am doing is I set the “version” tag in Roon to “MQA” (by hand).
Hell, Tidal can’t even give us that! The “Masters” section in their app is the only way to find the albums and it’s just one very long, disorganized list.
One of my customers contacted their tech support about this and after a fairly long exchange the Tidal rep admitted that they were doing a pretty crappy job with this.
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No. Upsampling is a way to do digital to a slog conversion, filtering, with less harmful artifacts. It does not restore any information. And your DAC probably does upsampling already.
Second and third unfolding restore information, primarily timing information, from the original recording.
I did that too. And then I found a Focus can not look at Version.
Version is helpful in normal use. But I these early days of MQA, when we experiment and test a lot, I use a tag so I can filter.
We will soon stop this, I predict.
I am long past the age where I bought music based on format or recording quality.
Cool. I have one of your disk players a DV 50 great product
Personally I use the following combination
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Add all Tidal MQA albums to a Tag called “Tidal MQA”
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Go to that Tag…and hit Cmd / Ctrl A [select All]…and use the Edit tool to add Version = Tidal MQA to all the albums in the list…this then displays the ‘Tidal MQA’ in the bottom right hand corner of the cover art, which helps when browsing
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Go to Tag = Tidal MQA…and then save it as a Bookmark…as this allows me to look at all the Tidal MQA albums in my library with just two clicks
Once Tidal starts sharing the Format information with Roon, then this will all become a lot easier to maintain
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Agree it’s good to have the tidal mqa offering. Their implementation is incredibly half baked.
To launch something pretty big reinforcing their big differentiator in such a way lacking basic attention to detail… well it’s pretty lame
Go to a PC.
Start Tidal Desktop App (Not the browser)
Create a new playlist called Master or whatever you prefer.
In Tidal Click on Masters. Click View All.
Start adding MQA albums to your new playlist.
Go to Roon (you may need to do a Tidal sync first) and enjoy your newly added playlist.
You may find it sounds terrible 
(At least it does in my system)
[quote=“R1200CL, post:32, topic:20611”]
In Tidal Click on Masters. Click View All. Start adding MQA albums to your new playlist.[/quote]
Is there a way to select all of the albums in TIDAL’s Masters list and adding them at once to a TIDAL playlist? Edit>Select All does not do what it seems to advertise.
Which is sad, because some of us have things like a Meridian 861 4.24 which is hard to beat, but then we could get a dac like the Brooklyn, but the fear is that aside from MQA, the rest of our audio collection would sound worse, not better. MQA sounds great from what I’ve heard on TIDAL, but it puts some of us in a pickle.
Yes, but due to the nature of lossy compression above 22kHz, most of information in the 2nd and third fold back are basically ‘non existence’; thus it behaves like ‘up sampling’. Besides most of recordings don’t even have much information beyond 60kHz, so in my own opinion 96k sampling in the first fold back is more than enough to reproduce all the information.
Not to my knowlegde.
I’m OK with the present status. I’m sure both Roon and Tidal is working on a way to easy identify MQA, including MQA Studio or not, ( blue vs green light), as well as bit (unless all is 24) and the max sampling rate.
I’m sure by Easter things look better. Or in worst case by next CES 
So far I’ve only found Studio masters, and since my explorer2 DAC only can tell the first 2 ogami, I don’t know if any above 176 or 192 exist. Or if they ever will il display that info. (In Roon)
Quite many are 88/96, so in theory Tidal or Roon decoding should be quite good.
As indicated, playing through Roon at the moment does not seems to tell “the truth”. I don’t know why. Play one MQA, and then then normal hifi version, (both using Roon) the latter sounds best.
I’m using MicroRendu, connected to a non MQA DAC/pre. And I have not yet added my explorer2 on that output. That may changing things. Only used my MQA DAC direct from PC.
If using Tidal app and W10, MQA may be better in some cases. A good example of huge difference is Grateful Dead and American Beauty.
Can Meridian 861 4.24 update to support MQA decoding? I know Meridian is far better than Mytek Brooklyn.
VIf we assume that DAC can be firmware updated, then does it one way or another support the MAQ lights ?
The Meridian Audio Director that I would think as a big brother to the Explorer2 does not have MQA upgrade offered. And I’m sure it is very easy to do if Meridian would like to offer, but they can’t. Or probably not allowed.
Why?: No display or those lights that Explorer2 has.
So what is your best guess now to your answer ?
And if yes, why has it not happen ? Roomcorrection, multi channel, or lack of USB ?
Understand what I’m thinking ?
There are two statements here.
About lossy compression: MQA doesn’t do lossy compression in the sense of MP3. They discard completely the information ranges outside of the interesting triangle, and preserve completely the information within. E.g. your music is unlikely to contain signals of maximum volume at 100 kHz (we hope, for your tweeters’ sake). Similarly, there is a noise floor below which there is no interesting information. So the term “lossy” is technically correct, in the sense of mathematical information transfer, but it is misleading because it makes us think in terms of audio lossiness. The descriptions they have provided indicate that the origami unfolding is not a lossy process, or at least lossy enough to limit the effectiveness.
Wrt the value of higher sample rate: Bob Stuart for a long time agreed with you, and hence all Meridian gear maxed out at 96. He believed there was no value in going higher. But the recent research they have done, which led to MQA, indicated that our sensitivity to timing errors was much higher than our sensitivity to high frequency. So we need the high frequency sampling data to convey the necessary timing precision. Therefore, if you believe the MQA story, you shouldn’t make statements on the conventional sense of the value of high frequency processing. (And if you don’t believe the MQA story, why are you engaging in the discussion?)
An analogy illustrating why conventional frequency range analysis is insufficient to capture the exquisite sensitivity of human hearing. A friend of mine is an astronomer, and he knows the resolution limit of an optical system, based on the diameter of the aperture: this is caused by physics, by the diffraction of specific wavelengths, it’s an absolute limit and has nothing to do with the quality of the optics. One day, he was watching a glider being towed aloft by a prop plane. Having been in a glider, he knew the dimensions of the planes and the thickness of the tow rope; he could calculate the distance based on the angles, and he knew there was no way he could see the tow rope at that dustance, it was way smaller than the eye’s diffraction limit. And yet, he saw it. Some people may mutter about confirmation bias. But the reality is that the eye does a continual scanning back and forth and does signal analysis, and can see things that are statically unresolvable. Just like signal analysis can identify signals that are buried deep in the noise (negative signal-to-noise ratios), which is why we can pick up the signals from Voyager’s 20 W radio. Now, this is just an analogy. I have no idea if this is how the auditory effects behind MQA work. But the analogy illustrates why a straightforward Nyquist analysis may be insufficient, asa Stuart claims.
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Suggestion: hope that future builds of Roon to support MQA decoding will have a ‘Masters’ section seen below:
seen here is Auralic Aries Mini running on their latest DS lightning software. This makes life more easier finding all MQA albums in one place.
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Thank you @AndersVinberg, I guessed this ‘lossy compression’ have been brought up so many times since the beginning of inception, some have argued it is and others otherwise. In my opinion, the bit rate tells a lot what is going on the format and I’ve raised this in the past, unfortunately nobody can give me a definite answer. So doing this again will simply make another round of ‘heated argument’, I suggest, let sit down, have a beer and enjoy the music!
In some way I’ve given up MQA but because Tidal streams MQA and it sounds good using the Tidal desktop app to decode back, I will see more MQA in streaming in the future, especially in Roon.