No MQA support in Roon ARC?

Loving ARC so far, but missing MQA. Is this coming later or am I missing something? Using my AudioQuest DragonFly which is MQA compatible and Roon Ready.

Roon ARC doesn’t support MQA unfolding, but MQA signalling is passed to the DAC.

ignorant question (and I do NOT want to get into a flame war about mqa that is not my intention!!):

given Roon Arc does not do MQA unfolding, if my DAC does not do MQA either (it’s a Chord Mojo), is there any sound quality penalty in playing a MQA version of a track on Roon Arc vs a non-MQA version?

I guess I don’t know enough about how MQA works (and honestly I don’t want to know) :wink:

thanks!

Probably not. Don’t sweat it, and enjoy your music on the go.

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AH OK I think I just figured out why the sound doesn’t sound as good at least in my memory … on the go with Roon Arc I don’t have access to the DSP convolution filter that I use with my headphones :pensive:

Maybe a feature planned on the horizon?

It is planned.

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excellent !

Recent listening experience at home made it abundantly clear that MQA without full decode sounds like crap compared to FLAC.

Our path is Tidal → Naim streamer → McIntosh pre & amps

Naim doesn’t support the last unfold. It was stupid obvious that if you don’t have that in hardware you should avoid MQA entirely.

The problem I have now is going through and reversing all the albums where I favorited the MQA version and made it “primary.”

huh interesting. I will have to try this experiment…

Technically yes. But no need to flame over it as the flaming can be reserved for the debate (somewhere else) on if this is audible. But, technically, yes… let me explain…

MQA’d PCM “steals” some of the bits to encode the MQA. The bits stolen are then errors in the PCM compared to the lossless file. MQA does this in a very specific way to minimize the impact on the DAC. In fact, most DACs don’t have the “resolution” for properly resolving these bits anyway. This is the MQA argument that it’s “not audible”. However, the bits are still manipulated for MQA and therefore my opinion / answer is that technically, yes, there is a penalty.

a postscript about getting DSP: if I activate airplay on my MacBook Pro laptop (to make it an airplay receiver), and then set my iPhone output to airplay, then I can use SoundSource (a paid app) on my laptop to load up a headphone DSP profile and play the audio through my chord mojo (connected to the laptop via usb) :+1:

I would love to be able to run Roon Arc on the laptop itself and skip the iPhone

Still — pretty cool that I am streaming a lossless*-FLAC-rip-of-a-CD from a NUC in my basement at home, over the internet, to my iPhone, then to my laptop, then to my Mojo, to my headphones, into my ear. What a world.

  • edit — “high quality” not “lossless” according to Roon Arc, when outputting to airplay
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following on my prior post … I’ve discovered quite a few cases where Tidal offers me only an MQA-encoded version of an album. (For example, London Calling shows up in two variations, both MQA-encoded.) A FLAC version seems not to exist.

Now, since I can’t compare two versions, it’s impossible to say whether MQA sounds better or worse. What I can do, I discovered, is to pay Tidal half price for their “HiFi” subscription. But it’s even better motivation to try out Qobuz… something I’ve avoided for a while (having undergone a painful conversion to Tidal, so bad that I still haven’t dropped Spotify).

Already I like Qobuz. I was expecting something much more oriented around classical music, but its baseline welcome playlist itself lines up quite nicely with my own tastes and preferences (exactly unlike Tidal). In my first few minutes browsing I came across a new live recording by Guadalcanal Diary, something that might exist on Spotify and Tidal but which I’d never seen before.

So far so good. Gonna see what happens if I copy over my library & favorites with Soundiiz …

BTW I can play Tidal Masters (and locally stored MQA) files to my Naim streamer.

The Roon Core undertakes the 1st unfold up to 24/96, so this caters for all the MQA 16/44.1, MQA 44.1, MQA 48, MQA 88.2 and MQA 96 files,
This caters for 98% of the available media on Tidal.

Any MQA 192, MQA 176.4 and above is played at 24/96.

The Roon stream is then played over a SonoreUPnP Bridge directly into my Naim NDS in WAV format, where it is played wonderfully.

On the ARC front, since the stream to the Mobile originates from the Roon Core, why can’t MQA format be unfolded to the max 24/96 format, and then passed to the Roon ARC app running on the Mobile device?

With a Dongle DAC I can support up to PCM 24/192, DoP (upto DSD128) and also upto MQA 384, but it needs the 1st unfold in Roon Core first with MQA signaling present, so the 2nd and 3rd processes can be undertaken in the Dongle DAC.
Please make this configuration possible.

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