MQA support for Node 2?

Gregory Porter is gorgeous any way you listen!

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@Chrislayeruk Just took a listen to a few Gregory Porter albums in MQA. Youā€™re spot on.

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Can confirm here, the NAD C390DD is now playing MQA through Roon. (After waiting more than a year)

If I can just chirp in here. Iā€™ve been enjoying the conversation and it has helped my understanding. I had been exchanging with TonyW, way back in the day about Roon and Bluesound and eventually Roon and MQA.

I think the simplest way to think about this is that there are several jobs to be done and you need to decide which device does whichā€¦ single box or specialized. By analogy, one can think back to Dolby Digital 5.1 vs Dolby TrueHDā€¦ one required your receiver to have SPDIF, but the other required HDMI. If you had an expensive BlueRay player, you could have it decode the TrueHD and pass it along as analogue outsā€¦ same story here, just a bit more complicated.

In the chain there is:

  1. Music browser: Roon can do this, so can Bluesound (though most of us rightly prefer the latter
  2. Language of Streaming: Roon RAAT or Bluesound depending on your choice in 1
  3. Streamer of Bits: your wifi
  4. Receiver of Bits: Bluesound can do this for both RAAT and Bluesound protocols
  5. Decoder of Bits to ANALOGUE MQA quality output: Bluesound can (now) do this for both RAAT (new) and Bluesound language (it could do this for a while)

As I understand it, MQA requires a software unfold and a hardware (DAC) unfold. Bluesound can do (A) one, (b) both or Ā© neither, but only if it understands what it is being asked.

A: Roon unfolds, Bluesound (now corrected) to know it should do the second unfold = full MQA
B: Forget Roon, BluOS and the Bluesound box work together for full MQA
C: Neitherā€¦ Roon unfolds, sends to Bluesound (ONLY AS RECEIVER OF BITSā€¦ using the settings TonyW described to youā€¦ to ā€œpassthroughā€ the unmanipulated data) and Bluesound passes that on to an MQA capable DAC.

In your case, you want to do C, but you donā€™t have an MQA DAC, hence you are only getting the first unfold.

Want it all? Choose B and let the Bluesound DAC do the work. DOnā€™t like that? Fine choose C, but SOMETHING has to do that second DAC unfold.

Hope Iā€™ve helped and not hurt the discussionā€¦ Iā€™m still making sense of this as well.

Maybe I should have shortened it to:

In short, MQA is a software unfold followed by a hardware unfold which yields analog music. The ā€œhardwareā€ unfold requires an MQA DAC. Like most hardware, if you output from SPDIF/Coax, you are doing so to avoid using the internal DAC and rather to use the DAC of the downstream box connected to that SPDIF/Coax output.

You canā€™t expect Bluesound to use itā€™s MQA certified DAC if you are deliberately bypassing it.

Please correct me if Iā€™m technically inaccurate, but simplistically I consider the output of SPDIF/Coax to be still in the digital domain therefore not ā€œdecodedā€, ā€œunfoldedā€ or whatever you want to call it. Itā€™s not yet analogue.

@Adam_B Yes, you are correct. The final unfold in the Bluesound Node 2 can only happen if you access its internal DAC, which requires the use of its analog out capacity.

Can you elaborate please. I have a NAD C390DD outfitted with a Bluos MDC module (not Bluos 2 which came out later). As a Tidal subscriber, I was hoping to play MQA encoded files through my amp. But it looks like Iā€™ll need to replace the Bluos module with a Bluos 2 version. At approx $US500 a pop, I cannot afford such an upgrade if NAD wonā€™t give me something for my trade-in. I havenā€™t confirmed whether NAD will give me a discount for trade-in r not. But Iā€™m not holding my breath.

Both versions are playing MQA, my 390DD2 is also version 1 soā€¦