Setting up non-MQA DAC for Tidal/MQA

[Richard_Harris]

Until now, I’ve only had DACs which support MQA, so using Tidal has not been an issue. I’m now however moving to a DAC that doesn’t support MQA, but am going to hang on with Tidal, pending its possible migration to HQ audio. To play out MQA encoded content through the new DAC, am I right in thinking that I just need to set Roon to carry out the initial unfold, then let the DAC and/or HQPlayer deal with the content and ignoring the MQA encoding?

Thanks…

[WiWavelength (Andrew J Shepherd)]

Tidal/MQA on non-MQA DAC

My primary streaming source is Tidal, and my existing DACs are all MQA-enabled. My playout chain is via HQPlayer, where I upsample to DSD256 before passing to the DAC. Does that then mean that all MQA decoding is being carried out in software before reaching the DAC, as my understanding is that upsampling would prevent authentication of the MQA chain? Also, having empirically discovered that MQA encoding makes far less difference on most material than DSD upsampling, if I now move to a non-MQA …

AJ

[Richard_Harris]

I think I’d previously answered my own question! But was just trying to double check, as in my previous system there was always an MQA hardware device at the end of the chain