Not sure how many of you subscribe to Paul McGowan’s daily email blast so I thought I would share this from this morning’s email:
We’ll be launching both MQA and Tidal in a new, free, release of the Bridge II firmware in April. Owners of PWD, DirectStream, DirectStream Juniors (with Bridge II installed) will now be able to stream Tidal and decode MQA.
There will also be a new update for both Ted Smith designed DACs—DirectStream and DirectStream Junior. Ted’s done some rather wonderful work on improving sound quality, yet again, and this is very exciting. A new mountaintop to name!
I am extremely excited about this announcement and wanted to share.
"What we have determined is that MQA altering DirectStream itself is not acceptable. It’s worse, something we will not allow. This solution we just announced is a good compromise, allowing DirectStream to remain pure while unfolding MQA to its first level.
MQA’s second level upsamples the unfolded data and reconfigures the DAC—neither of which are processes we will permit because the results (while different) aren’t better. Quite the opposite, in fact."
Bizarre claim that there is upsampling in the 2nd unfold. If that were true then there would be no 44.1 unfolded MQA. I used to follow the PS blog but stopped a long time ago as a lot of what was posted was equally questionable.
On the PS Audio board, Paul says they are very close to introducing MQA software unfolding in the Bridge II. That would be quite a coup if they beat Roon to the punch on this one.
Actually that was their first position. They then spoke to Bob and now will do the complete full unfolding to 192k inside the Bridge II before the FGPA does the D to A conversion.