What is the difference between MQA on Roon vs MQA on a DAC?

I don’t have an opinion on MQA but that was the first explanation I read that I understood, so thank you very much.

An excellent summary. Thank you @William_Hobba

So I have Teac NT 505 and Auralic Altair, they both do MQA. What I should do if I want my streamer DAC do MQA? Device setup and set decoder and renderer? Thanks

Both Decoder and Renderer and Renderer-Only works with NT-505. Both methods get you MQA full decoding.

The other brand you mentioned does not have a licensed MQA decoder, they are not MQA certified. For this you should set it to No MQA Support or Renderer Only, such that Roon will perform MQA Core decoding before it is sent to this streamer.

If you want to group them both together, set both to Renderer Only.

I believe Teac do MQA too after firmware upgrade, are you sure Auralic Altair not MQA certified? Thanks
After do some research, You are right. Thanks

This thread started based on ROON 1.5.
Meanwhile we have v1.7.
Is Roon now capable to do unfold and decoding, thus passing passing hi res pcm to any non MQA DAC? (Getting the same result as beforhand with a needed MQA DAC)
If not, are there plans to include this functionality?

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Roon and Tidal software can decode MQA files as can MQA capable DAC’s. Only MQA DAC’s can do MQA rendering.

Only MQA Core decoding (first unfold).

It is likely impractical for a general computer software to do MQA rendering to a non-MQA DAC. MQA rendering includes DAC-specific filter created by MQA Ltd. as part of the certification process. Such a filter can only exist if it is MQA certified. For a non-MQA DAC, no filter for it has been created by MQA Ltd. and therefore no software can have a proper filter. Therefore this feature cannot be implemented to a generic music playback software.

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The topic was cleaned up to stay on topic and the question has been answered: you need no special hardware to do the first MQA “decode” but you need an MQA capable piece of hardware to do the second stage MQA “render”.

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