There’s no upsampling happening in Roon here. This is a common point of confusion about MQA–the 44.1kHz means is that the master recording used to make the MQA file was 44.1kHz. In their terminology, 44.1kHz, is the “original sample rate” of the master.
The MQA file still contains a stream at 88.2/96kHz. When we decode the file, we are decompressing the file to that resolution. All MQA files go through the same decoding process in Roon, regardless of the sample rate of the master recording that was used to make the file.
It took me a while to appreciate all that Roon offers; today any effort has been rewarded many times over.
Superb release that offers more than I could have hoped for.
Whilst listening to Roon Decode some Bowie MQA favourites for an old but excellent Meridian MS600 in the office, I realise that this will make many legacy products find new life; music newly minted.
And being able to listen to the excellent Absolute Radio 24bit/48kHz radio streams…the future of radio is here!
As you probably realize, those numbers are the original sample rates of the digital PCM incarnations of the master(s) which were subsequently MQA encoded. Analogue masters which have not already been digitized (or where the studio has chosen to go back to the original analogue tape) must be digitized, which can happen at any rate, but 192kHz seems to be the most common rate for material recorded in the analogue era.
In some cases, there may be more than master (e.g. original version and re-mastered version). Sometimes this may be obvious (e.g. Rudy van Gelder editions of certain Jazz classics seem to have original sample rates of 44.1kHz, but the originals are usually 192kHz).
In other cases (perhaps in the Norah Jones example you’ve posted), as has been mentioned, some studios do appear (unfortunately) to producing MQA encodes from different sample rates of a single master, probably to sell them at different price tiers. One has to hope that they are down-sampling a 192k master and not up-sampling a 96k master; according to MQA Ltd., the MQA encoding process does look for – and flag – any up-sampling, though I suppose it’s possible for the encoding supervisor to override such a warning. Personally, I go for the higher of the two numbers; I hope I’m not wrong to do so.
Is it my imagination, or does normal Tidal PCM sound better in Roon 1.5? Or maybe it has something to with better configuration of transport and DAC (I use USBridge with Pro-Ject S2 Digital DAC).
My understanding is that they employ a variety of techniques (which are not “just upsampling”) during encoding in order to extract as much quality as possible from the original master, and that there are sound quality advantages to distributing the output of that process at a higher bitrate than the original master.
At the same time, the file is honest about what the source material was, so you have that information to provide context.
A big release like this will take a while to grasp and digest. Well done