Dear all,
I have a very basic technical question. Can the Naim NDX2 support the MQA format offered by Tidal ? Moreover, a request for our Naim wizards: could you show the resolution on each album for Tidal ?
Many thanks,
Kim
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No Naim do not support MQA.
It can not. Naim guys and the biggest part of the community, including me personaly, are against MQA. Tidal gives you regular 16/44 when you request an MQA stream from the Naim device
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Many thanks to all for your swift and clear replies.
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That’s not strictly true - personally I have no interest in MQA either, but Naim have said that they would consider supporting it if the company behind it proved to have long term viability backed by sufficient customer demand. If that happens they may choose to do it, and the current streaming platform is technically capable of doing so.
As I understand it, every company that wants to incorporate MQA into their gear, have to give MQA detailed blueprints of their gear; revealing trade secrets in the process.
I sincerely hope Naim never embarks on the trail of MQA garbage.
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I know, but this way is much more funny 
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that people get offended by poor marketing…
There are several threads on MQA here, but I think most of us would consider MQA a proprietary solution to a problem that really no longer exists.
Back in the days it was developed many of us had very poor broadband speeds, and admittedly some people still do, but I suspect for most if their broadband is more than capable of streaming 1080p or better video, then any audio only streaming including lossless hi-res will be a breeze.
None of the streaming services are perfect, but I spent several months using Tidal alongside Qobuz which offers lossless hi-res streams. You will find threads which say that the presnetation differs between better than CD MQA and hi-res lossless streams, and I believe it does but how much of that is due to not actually comparing apples with apples when the source audio files may be mastered or levelled differently in some way.
In the end Tidal went because of cost of living issues and it getting little usage vs QObuz.
If the Tidal catalogue is much better for you, which it may be, and you want some basic MQA processing with NDX2 give Roon and Audirvana software a shot as they can to the 1st MQA unfold which is better than nothing.
Innuos will be releasing i assu.e a full unfold in their upcoming 2.3 release, status yesterday was in final QA testing.
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