So I just upgraded to Audirvana Plus v3
Hoping to stream MQA to my PS Audio DirectStream DAC Bridge II (over UPNP) and to the spanking new iFi Pro iDSD (over UPNP).
A+ v3 sees both devices and I have set both as MQA Decoder.
But both only get and process the basic 24/48kHz file. No decoding of the 24/48 to 24/192.
I know the PS Audio does full MQA up to 24/192 on the Bridge II with Roon.
Any idea what I am doing wrong?
The iFi iDSD may be only a MQA Renderer, not doing the full decoding.
Thus you need to set “MQA Renderer”, and not “MQA Decoder” for its MQA capability.
DirectStream DAC doesn’t support MQA, and according to PS Audio never will.
I did some additional investigation out of curiosity, and indeed the Bridge II decodes and unfolds MQA and presents to the DAC the normal digital stream.
It’s a kind of a hack, as you loose one of the benefits of MQA where they promise to compensate for the artefacts of the DAC. Still you get a benefit of a “better than CD” quality stream.
I wonder what profile they used for compensation, maybe something they tuned artificially or used some neutral setting. Probably PS Audio thinks that DirectStream doesn’t have such things as artefacts.
This may open in the future a road to add support to DACs that don’t have MQA support on board. It’s an interesting development. Maybe the manufacturers could offer the software renderers for DAC that don’t support MQA as plug-ins to be integrated in software like Audirvana.