Products that support Roon, MQA and DSD decoding, all streamed?

I’m currently very happily using Roon to Pi’s and a Meridian Mediasource 200. I could be interesting in a streaming solution that is Roon-ready and is as future-proof as possible, To me, that means it fully decodes MQA, DSD and the usual PCM (all streamed from Roon over the network). Are there any such beasts around yet?

The only one I am aware of in a single box is the Mytek Manhattan II with its optional Roon Ready network card. Which gets pretty expensive.

A slightly cheaper alternative is the Mytek Brooklyn with a RoonReady device such as the sonicorbiter or microrendu.

You can use these devices to make any MQA/DSD DAC work with Roon, but I don’t think there are many of those yet,

dCS Rossini DAC.
MQA not yet, but there will be a software update soon.
Thats the strong point, this unit is future ready.
But the price…

It would add that, in the context of MQA, the MQA decoder needs to be able to perform arbitrary DSP including room correction. There is nothing on the market that does this yet.

arbitrary DSP including room correction

I thought MQA specs do not allow for that. Please correct me if wrong. Thanks.

@Highfi Yes, you are wrong! Bob Stuart made this very clear in his Q&A answers on the CA forum. Answer A65.

http://www.computeraudiophile.com/content/694-comprehensive-q-mqa-s-bob-stuart/

The “Optional Intermediate Processing” in the bottom block diagram is “arbitrary DSP”. The problem is that, at the moment, it needs to take place in a “closed system” (i.e. in the same* box as Decoder 2).

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That’s great info. Thanks for taking the time to respond to me.

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Great.
Would be very happy when this could be implemented in the new
Weiss DACs 501/502
Quote from the Website:

The following DSP algorithms are considered for implementation:
Roon streaming.
MQA decoding."

Which to all intents and purposes means you can’t do it with MQA…

Sorry, just don’t get MQA. I really tried.

So something like the Sonicorbiter would pass through everything coming from Roon to its USB output unchanged, right? And Roon would pass through DSD and MQA.

What if I dropped the DSD requirement? What would be my options then?

The DSP point is a good one. I’m about to embark on playing with Roon’s new DSP options. I suppose these will work currently with Tidal MQA files, but only on the 48kHz version. I wonder what will happen when Roon does the unfolding to 96KHz. Will it be able to apply DSP to that? If so, that might be good enough for me, and I wouldn’t need a full MQA DAC.

Thank you very much for your help and suggestions.

i have a question about DSD-Upsampling and MQA
where i am a bit unsure.
Knowing that MQA excludes DSD Upsampling, does
Roon automatically skip DSD upsampling when using an MQA-Dac and playing MQA FIles and enable DSD again when playing upsampled 44 files?
Or do i always have to change DSP-Setup?

Hope that Q is not to stupid, but since i don’t have an MQA-Dac yet i can’t check this and i didn’t find information an that. If that should be Dac-dependend, my interrest goes to a Mytec Liberty .

Carsten

I found the Answer

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