Dear Tech Sages: I have my system’s network with the following components connected: Roon Nautilis,Direct Stream Mk 2 and Airlens. All three of the components have setting options for MQA,with the choices being Renderer Only,Decoder Only,Renderer and Decoder,or none. Is there a most favorable …

I have a Roon NUC, AirLens and MK2 setup. My understanding is that you’ll get one unfold and that is from the AirLens. The MK2 does no unfolding. So the highest I could get from MQA was 96kHz no matter what I tried with Roon. I have since switched to QoBuz which does not do MQA but gives you “…

I do not believe you will get the full benefit of MQA with any of those pieces. First unfold only. I have two components that state they do full MQA unfolding. One says it does 4x, the other says it does 8x. Whatever. I can’t hear any difference with any MQA anything. As such, I pay no attention to…

Thanks,Dave. Out of curiousity,did you try having the Nucleus+ do the unfold,rather than the Airlens? Appreciate your time and thoughts. Matt

I don’t have a Nucleus+. Went the NUC route. I saw no unfolding options in Roon at all.

Roon does the first unfold I believe. Am I wrong in thinking this? I think @minnesotafats told me that long ago.

Thank you,sir. Much appreciated. Matt

I think Roon has the capability of doing the first unfold. I forgot how to select it. I have been using Qobuz so much that I am forgetting MQA operations. :slight_smile:

Never found Roon unfold. All mine were done via the AirLens. I left Tidal for Qobuz due to MQA. Qobuz uses native hi-rez (that’s why Neil Young is with Qobuz) while MQA is noted to be a lossy format (ditto on Neil). Also, Qobuz was half the price (here in Canada anyways).

MQA Functions Using Nautilus,Direct Stream Mk11 and Airlens

Network Audio

daveboyd January 25, 2024, 3:12pm 7

Check out this thread that I started in Audio Components, should answer the questions:
AirLens & Direct Stream DAC MKII & MQA

Topic		Replies	Views
AirLens-MK2-Roon setup DACs	36	1642	June 9, 2025
AirLens & Direct Stream DAC MKII & MQA DACs	8	789	December 4, 2023
MQA with external streamers into DS Dac Network Audio	9	1330	April 25, 2019
MQA and what is best way with Roon Network Audio dac	4	1445	December 29, 2021
Perfectwave Directstream DAC MQA Set up DACs dac	16	2003	February 10, 2022

MQA Functions Using Nautilus,Direct Stream Mk11 and Airlens

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