Hello. Not sure if this should be a new post but I will try this and see if there is a response. I just upgraded to a MyTek Liberty DAC with Roon on a laptop running Windows 10 64 bit. The MyTek is playing through my system, but when I listen to a Tidal Master selection the MQA led remains orange, meaning I am getting PCM playback, and not MQA quality (primary reason I upgraded). When I go into Roon / Setup / Audio, I see two entries for the MyTek Liberty (WASAPI and ASIO). Both are disabled. The device that is showing as active, and playing music is “System Output”. When I enable either of the MyTek Liberty options and select them as output, there is no sound, and it shows “nothing playing”. I checked the Windows 10 Sound Control Panel and it shows Speakers / 2 - Liberty DAC as the default device. I downloaded and install the most recent device driver from MyTek and no change.
So, is this all because the Liberty is not yet fully certified? Or do I not have something set up correctly? If its the former I may have to send it back as this is not an inexpensive piece of gear (for my pocketbook ) and I made the purchase to check out the full MQA experience. I have 14 days to return the DAC. Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you for the response and suggestion. Here is what this shows. I see that it is showing “High Quality”, an not “Lossless”. So maybe a setting in WIndows?
It looks like Roon is decoding MQA before sending it to your Liberty.
Let’s check the audio device setting in Roon.
Is it set to “Decoder and Renderer”? If not then change that.
Sorry was not super specific. You need to be using one of the two Mytek USB options to get MQA to the DAC. Going through system output is going through the OS mixer which is not going to be bit-perfect which is what the DAC requires for MQA.
The goal is to figure out why you are not getting sound from either of those two options. If you have another player, like Foobar (which is free), you should be able to test and use the ASIO or Wasapi Mytek driver with it. If it doesn’t work, then maybe something went sideways during the original setup, and, you might remove the drivers and then re-install.
If you look at @Magnus_Back screenshots of his signal path which is MQA compliant through to the DAC it’s to Liberty ASIO. The OP roon has that disabled in roon so he can’t get to use it.
So he’s selected system output in roon as it’s the only one available, he’s hearing sound just not lighting up MQA on the DAC. He wants to figure out how to enable ASIO in roon.
I think.
I’m afraid I can’t comment on how to set up the OP’s laptop, However, I will mention a similar problem I had when I bought a Mytek BrooklynDAC+ for my 2nd system a couple of years ago.
When I set it up in my system, I found that I was not getting MQA decoding from my Brooklyn despite setting the device in Roon as being capable of MQA decoding and rendering. No green or blue MQA display on my DAC when playing MQA content from Tidal via Roon.
I found out with help from Sonore support that out that my Sonore microRendu was not sending a bit-perfect stream to my Brooklyn DAC+, and of course you need a bit-perfect signal for MQA decoding by the DAC to be possible. I could not work out why, but it turned out that there was a ‘volume’ setting in the microRendu configuration that I wasn’t aware of. This volume configuration was set to 70%, and this resulted in the stream to my DAC not being bit perfect. Changing this setting to 100% resulted in the stream from the microRendu into the Brooklyn DAC+ being bit perfect, and my problem being resolved with the appropriate green or blue MQA display on my DAC.
This is something I would not have resolved without support from Sonore.
I just want to point out that the most trivial looking setting on your upstream streaming device can result in the data stream to your Liberty DAC not being bit-perfect.
I did a firmware upgrade to 1.35, but had an issue. It took a couple of instances of pulling the plug and resetting the Liberty before it came up again. So the good news is now I am able to play through the MyTek WASAPI object in Roon. I get a green LED, which is also good. However, I tried several different Tidal masters and none of them show blue. (Could someone offer up a title they confirm shows the blue LED please). Also, in Roon it shows for any Tidal Master files I am getting only 24/44.1. (screen shot here shows same selection that was showing 88.2 kHz from the MQA Core decoder in one of my earlier posts):
