I’d be interested in an PiHAT with MQA support. Supposedly the ESS Sabre was built with builtin MQA support.
You’d think one of the PiHat companies could release a hat using said chip.
Sure, if you want to pay $300 for a $30 HAT with a blue LED… probably not commercially viable, lol.
Commercial MQA-capable playback devices require payment of a royalty to MQA Ltd per unit sold.
If the helm bolt can do it for $99 then no reason a Hat couldn’t. Realistically the licensing fee is not 100’s but rather 10’s or less of dollars. I haven’t looked recently but I remember several years ago the same was true for the sabre chip, it was ~$30 for the chip itself. So sure a pi hat that is $99-150 instead of the 30-60 they cost without the extra special bits. But there may be good technical reasons for not putting such an expensive DAC on such boards, ie they wouldn’t be able to do it justice or supply enough power etc.
And heck, even if it was $300 (which there is no reason for it to be) thats a lot cheaper than the 3K+ that some of the MQA dacs are going for.
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