If you read from the Auralic facebook posted on 6 Jan 2017:
…To those who do not have MQA certificated DAC, dont worry, we are also working on a private software based MQA decoder to send signal to your DAC using AURALiC’s latest upsampling algorithm. (Disclaimer: this is not going to use any MQA property software code.)
This is a piece of good news for owners of Auralic Aries products.
oophs… suppose to reply to @scirica, so sorry.
Got your message. I think the Altair, being a DAC itself would fall outside of this announcement by Auralic. Sounds akin to Roon decoding, which I will have in 1.3 (presumably).
A DAC is MQA’s preferred solution. The disagreement between Auralic and MQA was about their solution on a device with both analogue and digital outputs.
The Altair is a DAC that only outputs analog, so it fit the model. However it appears to have been caught up in the overall fallout between Auralic and MQA.
On a side note, I received an email from Auralic today stating they pulled MQA in 2015! The Altair was a 2016 release so now I’m questioning where I ever got the idea it was going to be an MQA DAC!
I have a NAD M12 with BluOS card and 192/24 and 96/24 files stream at 48/24 through Roon. The same files through the NAD BlueSound app stream at 192/24 or 96/24 through my M12. I’m hoping that Roon 1.3 will fix this so they stream at the higher rates…
Hi John,
Yes, this is the same thing that is happening to me. NAD support have said I should contact Roon, but my understanding is that the NAD M50 music server is Soon compliant so should accept MQA from Room.
As you have said the Room 1.3 may fix this issue. But given that Roon has issued an email today saying the 1.3 upgrade will be rolled out, lets hope this cures the issue.
But, I am not sure how to access the new version. Is it automatically updated? Any ideas.
Settings, Click About
I didn’t see anything in the notes about MQA support.
Yes - that is not encouraging.
Everyone I know is waiting on this. May affect my subscription if not there as has been said in many places it would be with 1.3.
Fingers crossed.
What I can say is I was with a very experienced audiophile and speaker maker’s place listening to his very high end reference system. Both he and I were gob smacked how good Tidal MQA was through the Tidal app and this guy is NOT easily impressed.
It really is a must have feature IMHO - Roon sales is likely to suffer if you don’t have it.
Fingers crossed for all concerned.
Thanks
Bill
See this.
I just downloaded version 1.3. As far as I can tell, there is no MQA support in this new version.
No surprise if you click on the thread I posted above you will see that Roon has said that the initial release of 1.3 will not support MQA.
Roon 1.3 was released this evening and I just installed on my Mac Mini. The user interface is improved and it now recognizes my NAD M12 as “Roon Ready”. However, it does not support MQA streaming from Tidal which is disappointing. 192/24 and 96/24 files are down sampled to 48/24. Hopefully this will be out in 1.3.1 or another release in the near future…
Bummer! Tidal MQA through Bluesound Node 2 as Roon endpoint are only 44.1/24.
We arent downsampling, we are just playing them raw. If you had a MQA capable DAC, it would be able to decode & render that stream.
I think you are looking for the software side decoder (only dacs are allowed to render)
see here for a good breakdown of the playback options
… and 48/24. Depending on the track.
We’ve relayed the MQA/RoonReady/Bluesound issue to Bluesound and they should be messaging soon
btw, great album 
I read somewhere that speculated the BlueSound DAC may be only a renderer, or whatever the term is, i.e. like the Dragonflys, and need a software decoder to unfold MQA files. Thus it works with their software and TIDAL at present, but not Roon.
So @danny any plan from RoonLabs for soft MQA decoder in Roon to feed MQA renderers ?
And, obviously very big thanks to the team for the excellent (and huge) 1.3 release. Congrats !!!
