Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion MQA - Related technology, products and music MQA decoding with Roon or C15 ... help please

This is baking my noodle a bit. Simple answer is to wait but that's no fun

C15+QNAP+G61R+DSP5500+DSP5000 system

Where is the MQA decoding going to happen?
(And when is Meridian going to help its users understand which products will be upgraded and which will not?)

Assuming the further down the chain the better ...

the speakers are getting on a bit now, so it is far from certain that MQA decoding will be released for these.

G61R would be ideal, but again it's not a current model, but maybe more optimistic than the speakers.

C15 is (kind of a) current product but then MQA is only valid for this source (which admittedly covers streaming), no MC/MD/MS products here.

Now add into this Roon, which my initial experience is that I love it although I have only played locally in my study/PC so far.

Surprisingly I am not a fan of the C15 in the listening room for one very specific reason - the display doesn't blank when you blank the displays on the rest of the system, and I hate having a bright display on while I am listening to music, so in the respect I am not unhappy to pension the C15 off, but that leaves me with no endpoint?

So how to hook Roon into the main system and where to host the Roon software?

You are not alone here, but the MS200 makes an ideal Roon endpoint to tie in with your Meridian system.
Chris

Gruffle

Run Roon on a PC or Mac, turn off core on the C15 and use the C15 as an endpoint in Roon, alternatively keep the C15 as core, set the C15 screen saver to its minimum, screen should go blank in about 2 minutes, or of course you can sleep the screen from the home icon.

We are all waiting for Meridian to explain the future.......

Russ

Seen from the MQA philosophy you want the entire playback chain's temporal behavior to be known to the MQA decoder so it can apply corrections on time smearing. So you want all your equipment to pass the MQA files unaltered and have the speaker's internal processing to handle MQA decoding. Only that way the d/a-conversion's influence on temporal behavior can be compensated for. It might even be possible to compensate for the loudspeakers.

This is my understanding also.

However with the 5K5's an 5Ks a bit long in the tooth now, I think it is far from certain they will receive the upgrade. May not have the processssing power either.

I am suspecting that M might be a tad frustrated that Roon have moved so quickly since the separation, giving M quite a major headache now of managing the MQA launch, which would be enough for any company of M's size, to having to manage Sooloos/Roon at the same time in order to stem what could be a rapid migration of M's customer base to Roon.

Communication is all though, so hopefully M can start sharing some plans soon to give some guidance to their loyal supporters.

All speakers with MHR will get some benefit from MQA, so those old legacy DSPs have still some years of life ahead of them.

Whether they will need an upgrade of firmware is another issue. I would guess they do but I would like to think M won't leave them entirely behind just yet.