What happened to your cover art, you don’t have an SD in the DSD?
I do have the SD card in but when I switch albums quickly it sometimes takes a while to show up or gets stuck on the last or doesn’t show up at all. I don’t notice often as I leave the screen off. I try to ignore the issue as it would drive me nuts trying to figure it out.
It’s been 2 hours and it still hasn’t shown up. I’ll try rebooting.
The DMP used to do the same thing…I wonder if there is common software code shared between DSD and DMP that causes this unreliable album art display behavior.
I think you just caught another bug. As soon as I put on a regular FLAC album it showed up. Then when I switched back to MQA it didn’t show again.
Awesome!
Wait, now it showed up! Unreliable artwork, good times. I am turning off the screen again.
Jeff’s is a correct assessment to my knowledge as well. Since Sixpack does not have a Bridge, he is not fully unfolding. I have one but rarely plug it in, and don’t much care about MQA. To each his own.
I shared Paul’s early feelings that MQA was an intrusive means of going about it, both on the catalog and mastering side, and on the user/DAC side. I didn’t (and sort of still don’t) care if it was the greatest thing since sliced bread. Why not do it like FLAC? Because then you do not control the entire process from catalog to mastering to hardware to listeners’ ears. As I mentioned earlier, if this were benefitting the artists, I’d be all for it. Except for the requiring-dedicated-hardware part.
I understand not caring about any of that, and only caring about the sound on your rig. Fair enough. The issue I have, which still remains, is - that all seems like a lot of rigamarole and a high price to pay, yet still not be sure if it is in fact “the best sounding” iteration of a given piece of music. Just as folks didn’t understand when some of us were early adopters of SACD - another closed ecosystem requiring special hardware - some of the albums/masterings/etc. are better than what existed, and some not.
Sony was hoping SACD would Take Over the World, but it flopped as a format - and has, all these years later, been resurrected, because DSD is one of the best means of digitizing sound we have to this day. Not sure what the Future of MQA will be.
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The DS DAC is about 3 months shy of 5 years old. It’s unfortunate these artwork issues continue to pop up from time-to-time. It did annoy me when my DMP did such things, especially when the cover art didn’t match the CD playing at the time. It must be a tricky fix given it’s taken this long not to fix.
Sort of. The unfold of the MQA compression is handled in the Bridge and the final uncompressed music is then sent to the DAC. In this way, the DAC just sees it as a high resolution file and knows nothing of its heritage.
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Actually, we do the full unfold in the Bridge as far as I remember.
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The Bridge does the full unfold. Listeners get the full benefits, whatever they may be, of the MQA unfold when using the Bridge.
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You are getting everything MQA has to offer when playing through the Bridge.
MQA does not require “control” over the DAC. It requires us to turn a light on and off to signify MQA is being processed and to what level.
The DirectStream Sr. with a Bridge and Junior with its built in Bridge provide the full MQA experience.
I, for one, am not a fan of MQA and find it interesting but mostly not better. But, that’s just me.
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Gee, that is strange as I remember you saying either in a video on Youtube or in the forums that You do not do a full 2nd level unfold as that would involve allowing MQA software to control the DAC. That is why MQA duty was relinquished to the bridge card. This is why the Directstream will not decode an MQA encoded CD unless it is first ripped to external storage and sent to the bridge. I am glad that you are keeping MQA out of the DAC.
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I do not even attempt to unfold MQA. I would not purchase any disks with MQA encoding and I do not stream. I have no use for MQA. My comment about little support for MQA has to do with Disk manufacturers and I hope that never changes. We have true High Res available on SACD and I do not want to see Redbook CD compromised.
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I don’t particularly like MQA going by my experience with it… More hype than anything else …!
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I am happy to be wrong about the full unfold of MQA for those that do stream. I am even happier that it resides in the bridge and not the DAC primary as I do not want the performance of my DAC to be compromised by the restraints of MQA. This is a best of both worlds situation.
I am no fan of MQa for sure because of the technical impacts.
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Glad to hear we are getting full MQA with the bridge. I’m also glad PSA decided to embrace MQA along with the industry even with you not being a fan of it.
That does bring up another question. With MQA support on the bridge II does this means there will not be anymore support/improvements to MQA past the bridge II card? I believe I read where moving forward all of your efforts will be on the new bridge III card. I know the bridge III card will not have support for Roon but what about MQA?
[This is why I am glad we have options. I for one would not purchase a DAC that doesn’t have support for MQA either via software or an integrated card/module.
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Thank you, your answer explains the process to my satisfaction.
It might be my imagination, but Is there a streaming vendors war going on or are they just awkward providers?
The cover art on my DMP has been great since the latest firmware update. All of my thousand + CD’s are showing up!
I agree.
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