After a weekend playing with the Explorer 2, I’ve come to this conclusion.
Yes MQA can sound better than flac/alac or other formats. But in my opinion, playing music with Dirac or DSPeaker Anti-Mode sounds better than MQA without room correction. Ideal would be the two, MQA and some sort of room correction.
For now, I do MQA like this: Tidal (soon Roon 1.3 I hope) >Dirac>AudioEngine D2 DAC>Amplifier.
It sounds amazing this way.
I do hope, that in the near future, some kind of room correction can be used with MQA DAC’s.
I’ve come to a similar conclusion, although I’ll be honest I couldn’t detect really any difference between CD and MQA.
The effect of Room Correction in my setup was pronounced and obvious. The MQA difference, if its there, is incredibly subtle.
If I had to chose between one to the other, it would be an obvious choice of RC. Luckily, I don’t have to make the choice since my main hifi doesn’t have an MQA DAC, and I use room eq, and there’s practically no music in MQA of the kind of stuff I listen to.
Same here. Been playing around with the Explorer 2 and MQA is a far more subtle change on my system than room correction.
This is of course dependent on your system and how good your listening room is. I could imagine it beeing the other way around in a dedicated listening room but my guess is that to those of us who have our speakers in a real livable living room, room correction will win out most of the time.
I hope to be able use room correction with MQA in the future.