Setting up non-MQA DAC for Tidal/MQA

[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