GoldenOne
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- Jun 25, 2019
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- #4,001
For a little background on this area, I've had several manufacturers telling me that mqa has been heavily pushing (though not explicitly forcing) them to upsample all content using an mqa reconstruction filter prior to the dac.A typical consumer MQA-rendering DAC - eg infamous $300 Dragonfly Cobalt - when fed with a core-unfolded stream, will apply one of it (16) MQA filters following the command embedded/watermarked in the data. And will turn on the ‘blue (actually magenta) light’. No non-MQA filters or user-selection options are available.
I've been told that this is to prevent issues when attempting gapless playback or switching between mqa and non-mqa content or even multiple mqa tracks in some instances.
I don't use an mqa device or listen to mqa content regularly so I don't know how bad this issue is but multiple manufacturers have separately expressed their disagreement with this in particular.
Some companies like ifi are seemingly branding it differently, ifi's GTO filter etc