Yes full unfold of higher resolution format beyond 24/96 does require a MQA DAC, which Naim does not offer. And there are some additional processing undertaken by a MQA DAC for “
precise file and platform-specific DAC compensation and management.”
However the first unfold, as implemented in the MQA Core Decoder “recovers all the direct music-related information. Output is 88.2kHz or 96kHz”. This is implemented in the Roon Core.
There is a MQA Renderer, which “paired with a core decoder, can complete the final unfold and deliver a fully decoded MQA experience.”. So I have a Zorloo Ztella which is just a MQA Render, it either works with an iPhone/iPad as a Roon Endpoint (the Core performing the 1st unfold), or with the native Tidal App, which is also a MQA Core Decoder.
So for formats upto 24/96 the Core Decode recovers & outputs the stream as either 24/88.2 or 24/96
I have listen extensively to 24/96 and MQA 96 and it is hard to discern which. For anything of a lesser format the MQA version can sound better through my ‘Roonified’ NDS/555DR player.
On Tidal 95% of Tidal Masters are at or under 24/96, so will be unfolded and played back in 24/88.2 or 24/96, as such with Roon you have support for the majority of the Tidal Masters available without needing a MQA enabled DAC.
Thank you for the information. I believed the Tidal app was doing some unfold but not sure how far it was going and unsure where the differences I was hearing were coming from and, hands-up, I gave up trying to find out. Seems to be the same as Roon then?
It will be interesting to see how the future of MQA unfolds from here with their business modelling failing as the following critical article pointed in 2021 “The Roiling MQA Debate: A Sound Quality Test on TIDAL That Leaves More Questions than Answers”
Yes, just because the business licensing of MQA has failed to generate enough revenue to keep the company profitable, doesn’t mean the technology solution is at fault. There are many software startups with good tech that just don’t succeed 1st time round, and the technology ends up in a fire sale, and is bought and taken to market by another company or as part of a different solution.
Infact it may create a new future for MQA if it was made open-source.
That assumes MQA has a benefit. In terms of compression it only has a benefit for the relatively small proportion of people who want to stream online but live in an area with low data speed, consistently enough for 16/44 but not enough for 24/96. Otherwise it is only a benefit for the streaming provider as less bandwidth is needed.
As for its claims to bring something closer to the original recording, if I understand correctly that relies on making the dac filtering match that of the original adc, presumably carrying a code that tells the playing dac what is required: Whilst that might be possible with recordings put through a single model of adc, my understanding is that it is not uncommon for different bits of the music to have gone through different adcs, making it impossible.
If I remember correctly the Tidal CEO in his recent Q&A session said they needed to still look after their many subscribers who use “mobile” data, hence MQA may still be supported, so predominantly i assume mobile phone users who will still benefit greatly from MQA.
and no-one keeps track of which adc was used where. usually the engineers doing the tracking is anyone available at the time an artist show up. other people then do the mix/remix. in certain music there are no adc at all - the instruments are software making the bits straight into the daw.
None of the doom and gloom for the music industry that was predicted in the paper happened.
The paper was written by one very biased individual and unfortunately the paper got more exposure and false credibility because it was posted on the Linn website and thus got some sort of tacit Linn approval.
Most people who criticise MQA have not undertaken a fair comparison of its sound quality against Hi-Res FLAC using good quality fully MQA compatible equipment.
Tidal is now moving to Hi-Res FLAC so it’s all a bit of a moot point now.
I think that is unfair. The compression aspect which is the core of MQA could well have made sense and proved beneficial had online data rates not increased way beyond those available when the idea was conceived and development started. But I agree on the additional aspect of the “original master” concept attempting to make the replaying MQA-approved DAC mirror the specific ADC of the production ADC, which on the basis of my limited understanding was attempting the impossible on anything other than those recordings digitised through a single model of ADC.
I don’t. It was a power and money grab using completely proprietary tech, based on false promises that were never delivered. I never heard anything to make me believe (I heard it on equipment at my dealer, Lumin I think, and something else high-end). The TIDAL MQA didn’t better the corresponding 24-bit FLAC on Qobuz. It’s really just a minority of audiophiles that bought into it, and who know how many of them were shills. Look at the discussions about it on Steve Hoffman. Most are saying good riddance.
I believe if MQA had somehow achieved a critical market mass, we would have seen the profit greed floodgates open and we’d all be paying license fees to MQA to stream music. MQA was the keymaster for everything about MQA. There is nothing open about it, and that’s a bad thing for digital audio. Fortunately, no one really bought the premise. TIDAL was MQA’s only chance, but it wasn’t enough. I don’t think TIDAL’s subscriptions went through the roof when they partnered with MQA.
I didn’t for one moment for one moment suggest it did - in fact the second part of my post indicated that I thought the claim was highly dubious. What I thought was unfair was in relation purely to compression, where at the time of conception and initial development higher res than 16/44 would have been much more frequently difficult/unreliable to stream online due to limited data rates: The higher compression than possible with flac, supposedly losing nothing audible even if not bitperfect, was designed to enable higher music data transmission than otherwise was possible over often limited bandwidths. That in itself I don’t think was a flawed concept, but the reality was that it was overtaken by improvements in internet data rates long before MQA was taken up by Tidal, so it was a solution to a problem that had gone away. Now, how well it actually achieved in terms of sound quality (compared to 16/44) is something of which I have no experience - some people say it sounded better, others not, and some heard unwanted artefacts, but that is a matter of how successful the process was, not that it was a bad idea and a bad premise from the beginning.
I suspect the “original masters” concept was an attempt to find a marketability angle for a product that was obsolete by the time it was ready for release, and I agree with your assessment in relation to that side of MQA.
Sorry to disagree. That promise was so flawed. I’m in the IT field (software engineering, but close enough) and no one in my trade didn’t believe we would achieve the kind of mobile bandwidths we have now. It was already planned. The creators of MQA had to know that, and I think they just used it as a selling point to help launch their stillborn child, knowing full well it wouldn’t matter later. I think they were hoping it would help achieve a critical market mass they needed to make it profitable.
They had nothing compelling to offer in the beginning or the end, not really.
And I suspect for lots of people mandatory MQA was the one reason, like it was for me, to chose Qobuz over Tidal.
It will be very interesting to see what happens to Qobuz and Tidal when they both offer proper high resolution lossless streams. Tidal should win some business back now it’s not trying to force lossy streamed music on its subscribers. But maybe it’s too late?
