Roon MQA Question with the Direcstream DAC & BridgeII

Network Audio
1

I have the Directstream DAC and love it. I mostly use Roon to stream my own music on a local NAS server and stream Tidal.

When I stream Tidal MQA music to my Mytek Brooklyn DAC via a PC it shows a full purple “Lossless” - see pic:

PXL_20201028_150543509
PXL_20201028_1505435091512×2016 1.37 MB

But when I stream the same Tidal MQA music to my Directstream DAC via BridgeII I get the following blue “Enhanced” - there is also an additional step called “MQA Full Decoder” which is where the blue pops up in the chain:

Screenshot_20201028-110729
Screenshot_20201028-1107291440×3040 829 KB

Any idea why this is? Should I care? Am I doing something wrong?

Thanks in advance,

David

2

I don’t want to make assumptions about what is going on when you play to the Mytek. But the signal path for the DSD makes complete sense to me. Roon spits out the MQA files to the Bridge. The Bridge is able to do the full MQA unfold onboard (MQA full Decoder) and then you get the analog signal at the end.

The Brooklyn was one of the first DACs to adopt MQA unfolding so why it doesn’t have the Decoder listed is a mystery to me. Maybe it’s being done within Roon instead?

3

Just to be clear the blue indicator is a good thing. It means for MQA files you are getting the claimed full benefit of MQA encoded files when using the Bridge Ethernet card as your input.

Does your other DAC purport to do the full rendering of MQA files?

4

Great point Scott. Thanks for this!