MQA when upsampling

[Marcor (Marco)]

Hi,

I had a similar question here

Can someone please explain to me this signal path?

Hi @andybob, do you know what happen when you are passing an MQA signal to a DAC that is not MQA capable and you have up sampling enable? I am passing MQA to a raspberry Pi with IQDac+ and I get Roon showing this path. [27%20AM] So authentication is happening and the first unfolding is done in roon up to 96kHz then volume levelling but the part I am not clear is the Sample rate conversion up to 192kHz. Is this is a legitimate up sampling? thanks Marco

Can someone please explain to me this signal path?

Thanks Andrew, I get that Roon up sampling is incompatible with later MQA rendering but does it compromise the quality? If that is the case it would be nice if there was a way to automatically disable the up sampling if the DAC is not MQA compatible and Roon is playing MQA tracks, so that Roon does only the decoding. In my case I have 3 set up one is using a Mytek Brooklyn that is MQA decor/renderer, the other is a Devialet that has not MQA capabilities and a raspberry pie that similarly to t…

and John provided the following suggestion

Can someone please explain to me this signal path?

Hello @Marcor, It is possible to get the behavior you are looking for, with a little bit of configuration! If you set the device to “Renderer Only” in the “Device Setup” screen, it will allow you to upsample to DSD for regular PCM tracks, and for MQA content will only enable the Core Decoder and ignore your upsampling options set in DSP Engine. -John

I did try the same thing using ropieee and upsampling to DSD256 and the above suggestion works perfectly
Hope this helps
Marco