This does not make sense.
MQA works great when using Roon with Lumin products. Right @wklie?
Oppo told me that the 205 can only playback mqa files from a connected usb drive and never from roon.
Then Oppo is wrong. See my post above yours
Further info from oppo : MQA will only work with MQA files which are on attached USB storage. It will not work with Roon integration and never will due to hardware limitations of the player.
Best Regards,
Customer Service
OPPO Digital, Inc.
162 Constitution Dr.
Menlo Park, CA 94025Service@oppodigital.com
Tel: 650-961-1118
Fax: 650-961-1119
Unless Roon eventually fully unfolds MQA which could be sent via the OPPO at PCM to max 24/192ā¦thatās what Iād like as a Roon Labs Xmas giftā¦or Easter presentā¦or ā¦wheneverā¦
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Those two words of text represent the authentication feature in Master Quality Authenticated, indicating that MQA is being decoded and the data integrity is not corrupted by digital volume or something else in the playback chain. MQA certified devices must present this authentication in some way, usually either text or a LED in a certain color.
Hi @wklie, I understand, and I agree. I just meant that all the updates to the user interface might not be finalised in a beta firmware.
It seems @Len-ski now has a definitive answer from Oppo themselves, so I suppose we can put the matter to rest and join the chorus of people waiting for MQA to be processed by Roon, or buying MQA enabled hardware like the Lumin. I suppose RAAT must provide multiple options for streaming containers if you guys can decode MQA but Oppo only has access to a PCM stream?
Hi @thyname, you can buy off the shelf fixed, stepped or variable attenuators reasonably cheaply that simply plug into the cable between your UDP-205 and your amplifier. They are specified in terms of the number of dB of attenuation they provide (e.g. 6dB, 10dB). Theyāre generally passive resistor networks so if theyāre well designed and a good match for your system they shouldnāt produce a notable frequency-dependent colouration to the sound. Youād still have to do a little bit of maths to figure out which attenutator to buy, but you wouldnāt need to know how to use a soldering iron.
In terms of whatās best for your setup ā¦ the one thing the Oppo misses compared to certain processors and preamps is advanced processing for things like bass management and room correction. It has a solid rudimentary speaker and bass management, which is enough for me, but if your needs are more complex then using your preamp may provide a functionality not available when just using the Oppo.
Other than that ā¦ I am a firm believer in (carefully) testing every setup you can configure in your own system and just using the one that sounds best to you. I come from a very technical background, so I appreciate and tend to end up buying well engineered equipment that measures well, but at the end of the day you donāt listen to a frequency plot, and psychoacoustics are a fickle thing. I can hear heaps of differences when I A/B equipment Iām thinking of buying ā¦ but my memory and perception of them disappears over about a week after I take one or the other product home and my hearing adapts to it.
I donāt think there is one right answer. I donāt know how the DACs in the UDP-205 compare to your other DACs. But I recommend just trying it (carefully) and seeing which one you prefer.
Thanks for the detailed reply!
I did some more research. It appears that Oppo UDP-205 has an output impedance of 50 Ohms (on its XLR).
By rule of thumb, the amp needs to have an input impedance of minimum 15 times of that.
My amp (Rotel RB-1590) has:
INPUT IMPEDANCE
Line Level Inputs (RCA): 12kĪ©
Line Level Inputs (XLR): 100kĪ©
As 100,000 ohms is 2,000 times higher than the Oppo outputs impedance (both XLR), I should be OK?
On that setup I am using Lumin T1 as a DAC / Streamer. I plan to move the Lumin T1 on my headphones setup (currently using Holo Spring KTE as a DAC), and have Oppo replace the T1 w/ my speakers setup. I will sell the Holo.
From what I have tried with my headphones, Lumin T1 does quite a good job compared to Holo Spring KTE.
By doing so, I will also get rid of several āspaghettiā solution stuff I have (power supplies, usb regenerators, Singxer su-1, etc.)
Hi @thyname, I havenāt been able to find a definitive specification on the XLR output impedance, but with an input impedance of 100kĪ© on the Rotel you should be fine to avoid the frequency-dependent signal modification that would come from a mismatched impedance.
The more important specification in terms of equipment being destroyed is the input sensitivity. The Rotel produces full power when 3.5V is applied to the input. The Oppo puts out 4.2 +/- 0.4 V on its XLR - i.e. possibly up to 4.6V. If you set your Oppoās volume to 100 the signal into your amplifier will clip. This will degrade sound quality, but it also risks generating sharp-edged signals where it clips with significant high-frequency components that I believe can blow tweeters, although Iāve never experienced it myself.
Again, I havenāt done the detailed math, but there is a thread on hometheatrehifi where someone responds to a similar question related to an amplifier with an input sensitivity of 3.3V with a UDP-205, and finds that that the output of the Oppo is about 2.1dB too hot for the amplifier input, which is not much in the scheme of things. They suggest buying a pair of 3dB attenuators. The Oppoās volume control operates logarithmically, I believe at 0.5 dB per step - so if you kept your volume on the Oppo below 94 you might be OK. Iād keep it well lower than that to allow a margin of error until you get some attenuators.
My amp has an LED to indicate input clipping, so I am able to turn the UDP-205 up very carefully one step at a time until it starts clipping. As far as I can tell, yours doesnāt. Whatever you do, do it very carefully! Start at zero volume, and increase things slowly. If its going to be in a permanent installation I really recommend attenuators to ensure you or a visitor donāt inadvertently blow something up!
Finally - Iām just passing on my imperfect understanding of all of this and some unverified numbers from other forums - if you want to go down this route you should really read up on everything enough that you understand it, can do the calculations, and can test the operation of your system for yourself.
RAAT provides PCM (or DSD when appropriate) data to a Roon Ready endpoint, with information on whether the PCM stream is MQA-encoded or not. Seeing this information the endpoint can route the PCM data to MQA decoder or send it to regular PCM processing (without MQA decoding) accordingly, provided that their hardware and software architecture are capable of switching between these routes.
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Thanks for the clarification @wklie. It sounds like the limitation is baked into the Oppo UDP-20X hardware in the way they route signals from Roon into their signal processing and DACs, similar to the issue that prevents them implementing multi-channel audio from Roon. Itās a shame they didnāt think to make their routing more flexible to cover these unforeseen use cases.
This May be ignorant. But if you use the OPPO as a dac through usb is it not possible then to both send DSD from a Mac mini using Roon but also mqa? Then you are not limited by the streamingā¦
Hi @rasmussenmorten. I donāt think that question is ignorant at all. I hadnāt thought of it because one of the benefits in upgrading to the UDP-205 for me was finally getting rid of the long USB cable I was using to my BDP-105D.
I just ran a temporary USB extension from my computer to the UDP-205, and produced the results shown in the photos below. The Roon signal path shows the MQA input file at 352.8kHz and reports that the signal path is lossless, but on the television screen the Oppo reports that it is receiving a LPCM 2.0 stream at 44.1kHz.
Iām not sure what to make of that, but it doesnāt look promising. There is certainly no MQA badge shown anywhere on the television or the Oppo display.
I also included an image of the settings I used for the USB output, just in case anybody wants to know.
Is this similar to why Bluesound doesnāt see MQA via Roon just now?
Given MQA seems largely intended for streaming, isnāt the value of Oppo support of MQA only for local storage questionable?
When I emailed oppo support, I told them that there claim of ā mqa support ā seemed misleading. Got no response to that part of my question.
Cameron, et al. you are correct! No true MQA unfolding going on! Forgot to āreplyā but once I rechecked the āTVā screen it indeed just showed 24/44 or 24/48. I agree w/the other posts that OPPO may be a touch misleading on this! The comments on the Beta say nothing about MQA on USB storage only! That is the beauty of Tidal Mastersāstream it! I was hoping to forever stop buying HiRes FLAC from HDTracks, etcā¦I wonder if OPPO added back the āappsā like Tidal which is ābakedā into my OPPO 105 interface on the 205 (not happy they arenāt thereālove my Berlin Phil subscription-thankfully it works great on Apple TV), then we could use the Tidal app on the OPPO 205 interface to get MQA streaming w/o using Roon (not the way I want to do it, but could be a work around just for MQA)ā¦or we just wait for the Roon vs. MQA battle royal to end and then Roon can do the 1st unfold for usājust sounds like we will never get the full unfold using the OPPO due to hardware issues. I could have sworn when I did a few āhead to head comparisonsā the MQA files sounded betterā¦I guess maybe just the 24/48 Tidal Masters sounded better than a few of my 16/44 CD rips, but was hoping I was really getting 24/96 and 24/192 via streaming Tidal Masters on the Oppo 205āthat would have been awesome!
Oh well!
Doug
Anyone saw this today?
With Tidal loaded in my Win 10 laptop connected with usb, my screen says: USB Audio In LPCM 176.1K and Master shows at the bottom. Have you set Master in your Tidal settings and choosen Oppo 205 as your player?