Why do manufacturers support MQA?

[danny (Danny Dulai)]

@Travis_Morrison-Mcke

Can’t you just send the MQA signal untouched to the MQA dac to unfold?

yes.

@Travis_Morrison-Mcke

Why must you unfold the stream in Roon?

if one wants the 96/24 audio data, but they lack an MQA capable DAC.

@Travis_Morrison-Mcke

From my understanding, when someone buys an MQA dac, they have already paid a license fee (integrated into the price of the DAC) for MQA.

in that case, you’d send the stream to the DAC and no royalty is paid by Roon.

@Travis_Morrison-Mcke

I may not understand why the unfold even has to happen.

there are 2 reasons you’d unfold in Roon:

1. your DAC cant unfold (not MQA capable)
2. you want Roon DSP, which would destroy the MQA data, so it’s impossible to get 96/24 without having Roon do it.

@Travis_Morrison-Mcke

That is fairness- you pay for what you ate.

But the true cost of this is that you must “nickel and dime” each customer, which results in annoyance and decreased sales.

To continue your analogy: if one goes to a buffet “all you can eat”, do they get upset that the big guy eats more for the same price? I think they’d have some serious jealousy issues to resolve if that was the case.