@philr is correct. I hope this is a temporary situation, but as a workaround, you could determine whether an album is MQA by playing it and looking at the signal path (as of Build 242 the MQA info will show there) and then tag the album in Roon as MQA. (As I say, I hope this is a temporary situation — I really hope Roon will come around to using something like the Tidal desktop app’s M-in-a-square badge.)
From my own speculation based on the Build 242 release notes and various comments posted here, I think MQA versions of Tidal albums may be causing more problems with some systems than others. None of my hardware is at all MQA capable, and while I haven’t tried to play a lot of Tidal MQA albums, I haven’t noticed any obvious problems with playback on the ones I’ve experimented with.
When playing a Tidal track, if you click on glowing signal quality indicator dot … it will open up the signal path window… on there you can see the audio file format.
I’m hoping one day a Roon will be able to display this for Tidal albums / tracks before playing.
Thanks to everyone for responding. My suspicion has been confirmed. Until Roon adds this as a feature I will continue to check the glowing green button. No need for anyone else to reply. By the way, my internet is 10/100 and the DAC is hardwired. I’ve tried ethernet and WiFi on my MacBook Pro with similar results. I’ll look into this further. Thanks!
Hi, if you have a glowing green button you are listening at reduced capability. Something is down sampling or reducing/limiting bit rate. You need to be aiming for a purple light if you want to pass through MQA unmolested. I suspect that this is also linked to the distortion you hear because MQA should sound perfectly OK.
My SimAudio 280d DAC is Roon tested, but not MQA compatible. However, it’s my understanding Sim is going to offer a hardware upgrade to resolve this in the near future. In the meantime, I get annoying digital distortion, when I play a Tidal MQA disc/track through Roon and the 280d. Here is what Roon displays when I play an MQA track:
In your screen cuts, you have chosen System Output. Try choosing the actual SimAudio Device instead and see if that makes a difference. Screen posts of your Audio Settings would be helpful.
Choosing the actual SimAudio device fixed the problem and I can now play MQA albums/tracks. Thanks! I’m not sure how I got my DAC to appear (didn’t see it as a choice before), but it’s displayed now and once I selected it, I can play MQA without distortion. Exclusive mode is also disabled. Although my DAC (280d) isn’t MQA compatible (yet), is there any improvement to sound quality if I play MQA albums/tracks through it? It sounds pretty damn good!
