An MQA player with digital outs?

[dscottj]

NAD has announced a new network streamer. What I find interesting is that it seems to be claiming full MQA support, but has digital outputs. I distinctly remember the guy who made the MQA deep dive video claiming that digital outputs were disallowed by the MQA license. My Matrix Element M certainly doesn't have them.

What's up with that? Am I not remembering it right? Has something changed? Have they mislabeled it? AFAIK this is a very low cost device with full MQA support.

 

[Vincent Kars]

To the best of my knowledge, it is not allowed to have a device doing then 3th unfolding (the MQ filters + oversampling) and having a digital out.
The seconds unfolding ( restoring more or less the 24-48 kHz band) is allowed in both soft- and hardware.

 

[Jimbob54]

Unless I missed it, doesn't claim you get fully decoded mqa out of the digital does it? This thing is a dac so mqa may only apply to decoding internally with analog out.

The digital might only pass thru without any decode leaving for the next dac to do it all , or possibly output a first unfold PCM signal at max 96khz sample rate. Unknown, but I wouldn't assume it outputs a fully decoded 192/24 from an mqa source.

 

[dscottj]

Unless I missed it, doesn't claim you get fully decoded mqa out of the digital does it?

"It also has full MQA rendering and decoding capability for playing master quality music from Tidal." They claim it's a feature of the DAC chip. EDIT: Maybe. The ad copy isn't particularly well-written.

 

[Vincent Kars]

• Premium differential DAC design based on Texas Instruments PCM5141 DAC, with support for 24-bit/192kHz high-resolution audio and MQA decoding

I read this as analog out only

 

[Jimbob54]

"It also has full MQA rendering and decoding capability for playing master quality music from Tidal." They claim it's a feature of the DAC chip. EDIT: Maybe. The ad copy isn't particularly well-written.

It does- it just doesnt say what you get out of the digital outs though. Nothing about that line is false if all it does is do the full MQA decode/ unfold internally but only outputs that analog. It supports MQA.

Also, consider what DAC means- then consider what digital output means

 

[AudiOhm]

Would the digital outputs not just be a pass through of the digital signal?

Hence you would still need another DAC that can decode the MQA stream...

Ohms

 

[Jimbob54]

Would the digital outputs not just be a pass through of the digital signal?

Hence you would still need another DAC that can decode the MQA stream...

Ohms

Maybe not even that..

 

[danadam]

To the best of my knowledge, it is not allowed to have a device doing then 3th unfolding (the MQ filters + oversampling) and having a digital out.
The seconds unfolding ( restoring more or less the 24-48 kHz band) is allowed in both soft- and hardware.

Out of curiosity, what do you call the first unfolding then?
Because I always thought that what you call 2nd is the 1st unfold, what you call 3rd is the 2nd unfold, and there is no such thing as 3rd unfold.

 

[Vincent Kars]

If you look at https://www.mqa.co.uk/how-it-works and scroll down to MQA Full Decoder, they still talk 3 unfolding's. They have done so from the start. They don't explain it but they are very good in not explaining how it works (from the start).

Anyway, what I conjectured up:
A FLAC is send to you. You can't play it so it as to be decoded to linear PCM first: unfolding 1
It turn out to be not true hires PCM but MQA, the software transforms this 24/48 into 24/96 PCM (with a effective 17 bit dynamic range): unfolding 2
You send it to a MQA DAC: it detects the watermark, applies MQA prescribed minimum phase filters and oversampling: unfolding 3

 

[danadam]

If you look at https://www.mqa.co.uk/how-it-works and scroll down to MQA Full Decoder, they still talk 3 unfolding's.

Looks like the only indication of 3 unfoldings are the icons on this page. It is not explicitly mentioned in the text, at least I can't find it. But it does explicitly say that:

The first unfold recovers all the direct music-related information. Output is 88.2kHz or 96kHz.

Similar on https://bobtalks.co.uk/blog/science-mqa/mqa-playback/

MQA Core: The first unfold of the Origami recovers all the direct music-related information and makes it available for either analogue or digital output at 88.2 or 96 kHz.

 

[Balthazar2k4]

I can confirm that MQA material is being sent to my non-MQA DAC at 88.2 or 96khz via the digital coax on the CS1.