StreamingTidal MQA with Roon [undecoded] to an MQA DAC

FYI…you can get 16x resolutions from decoded MQA too. I am pretty sure I saw some in early demos on DSP SE speakers e.g. 768/24

Oh boy… Life was so pleasantly simple when Bob still believed 96/24 was all you needed… :wink:

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MQA, Tidal, and Roon… Please, please add and publish the source metadata for all “remastered” and “MASTER/MQA” albums and be transparent as to where the master source came from and what it was converted to.

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It’s a great idea and I fully support it, but the Roon forums isn’t the place that can really deal with the request. You need to persuade either or both of the record label making the file available to Tidal, or AllMusic (Rovi) who supply metadata to Roon. All people can do here is nod in agreement.

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Hello,

Current MQA selections shown in TIDAL under Masters albums list, suffice to say are incomplete between apparent (what’s shown in TIDAL desktop app) and actual (what i’m finding by playing rest of the 2L albums).

Seems like nearly all of 2L albums can be listened with unfolding, as i’m current unfolding with Explorer2 DAC and DP-X1. And soon with the Brooklyn.

Must endure this growing pain (in a good way) little longer with TIDAL and ROON, in weeding, sorting through to focus and select these MQA contents.

Experiencing distortion on some albums too…
Van Morrison -Astral weeks

@David_Chinnici

Can you give details of the track and the time into the track that you notice the distortion. I can’t find the Damien Rice album as a Master but can find James Taylor.

Cheers
Tom

Hello. Can anybody help me with the settings for the Dragonfly Red? I get the purple MQA colour in the Tidal app, but never in Roon.
Thank you.

You can’t yet with Roon and the Drafonfly Red.

See this.

It is because Roon does not decode MQA up to the first “MQA Heaven”.
I dont know if they will implement it. Maybe not, because they might consider MQA to be a lossy format.

Roon generally stays out of sound quality and lossless type discussions, they want to support the market demands they see across all these opinions without taking sides.

They have said they are working to support MQA, no timeline of course and exactly how it will work for various devices we do not know. This was the last they have said on MQA support I think.

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Yea, the market demand for MQA is huge.
Some shops reach the 2% treshold on sales.
It is so great, stunning. Its 1000% no scam.

You are misunderstanding me when I mentioned market demand I was referring to this in Brian’s post.

Regardless of your opinion on MQA it is clear from this forum that there is a lot of demand for decoding MQA within Roon and Roon are responding to that.

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As I said, the demand is huge, maybe even enormous.
I am awaiting that moment in quiet patience.

Sarcasm or ignorance…can’t quite tell.

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I’m all in on sarcasm.

Its feature after feature that people ask for a fixed release date.
So I thought a little sarcasm might be entertaining.
But I am not sure neither.

I just completed my two week Roon trial and I like it a lot; There’s definitely room for improvement,
but I signed up for a year and I look forward to future enhancements. However, I’ve been experiencing the same problem reported in this thread. On some albums or songs there is either distortion, a digital skipping noise or both. I suspected it might be DAC/MQA issue, but find it annoying because Roon doesn’t identify the media as such. Am I overlooking something obvious? For example,when searching for “Mud Slide Slim” two albums are displayed. The first one plays fine on my system, but the second one is distorted. Unfortunately, the second one isn’t marked with an “M” so I have no way of telling if it will be compatible with my DAC until I play it. This is particularly annoying when saving songs to a playlist and later finding out they’re distorted. However, if I search for the same album on Tidal’s site, the first album is marked “M” and the second is not. Both albums play well through my system. My setup is: MacBook Pro (server) > USB cable > Simaudio 280d. I can live with the digital distortion until Simaudio comes out with an MQA hardware upgrade to their DAC, but in the meantime I’d like to know if the album or song I chose is in MQA or not. Is there a Roon setting I’m overlooking?

No Roon does not currently identify if Tidal albums are MQA or not until you play them.

If you have local MQA albums they are identified as MQA.

Undecoded MQA files (typically 24/48 FLACs) are compatible with non-MQA DACs, so I’m wondering if there is another issue here. MQA files need a little more bandwidth than normal CD quality FLACs. What’s your internet connection like? Is your Mac on Wifi or hardwired to the LAN? If WiFi as a test could you try hardwiring.