Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion MQA - Related technology, products and music MQA solution into my DSP speakers?

I take it that there's no talk of Sooloos adding MQA decoding the same as Roon?

Hi folks,

Thank you for all your questions and comments, as it is helping me to understand too. In my rush to enjoy the best music quality, without SE speakers to hand, I can see I stepped into a lively debate!

I don't use Roon so Rick and I didn't discuss that; maybe he will comment here on the equivalence of 24/96 MQA via Roon versus the 218.

I can't think of a way to play the Tidal app through my M6.

Mat

Well I've manage (I think) to get an inkling of the possibilities of MQA following much of the dialog/debate over the last few days.

My primary quandary has been how to get MQA into my none SE DSP's, however thought I'd experiment and downloaded the tidal desktop app to my htpc this afternoon in the living room, which is hooked up to a 568 and L/R/C active speaker combo which includes an m33 via USB/switch/toslink. Having spent an afternoon comparing various MQA titles vs. the standard tidal hifi versions I have to say I'm smitten, and that's only with 24/96 capabilities through old Meridian kit.

Clearly I don't have any of the lights to authenticate the MQA stream, but the 568 is proudly displaying 48K so presuming this is as good as it gets - and it's damn good!!

Roon decoding, or the 218 into the 5200sl is now looking like a very exciting prospect after all...

Lee

OOPs. Sorry, you were looking for a a response from a DSP speaker owner. My Bad.

Other than the 6th May 2015 'Sooloos Update' from John Buchanan that stated:



There doesn't appear to have been any official update.

Tidal now have software MQA decoding (with no apparent encryption requirement)
Roon seems to be getting it at some point

I'd imagine the reason Meridian would want to prevent/delay offering this to existing customers would be to push upgrading to the 218 instead. (although this could backfire since a Roon lifetime subscription would be cheaper)

Maybe it's waiting for the 192KHz DSP firmware?
Matt.

I might be a little cautious about expecting all Sooloos kit to be able to decode MQA in software. Looking at the processor utilisation on a MacBook Pro running a quad-core i7, Tidal/MQA is routinely running at about 45% processor load ... and that's on a fast, modern chip.

Some of the older versions of things like MC200s - which were designed to be fan-less and silent - might well struggle with the MQA processor load whilst remaining within their thermal limits. I mean, we don't know until the new firmware arrives, but the extra processing requirements might mean some Sooloos hardware can only pass-through MQA to a 218/818 for decoding. Time will tell, I guess.

Wasnt it suggested once that MQA decoding could occur on a phone?

Thanks Matt, that's very interesting, although THB I'd given up on 192 on legacy speakers. It been in the pipeline for so long I'd be amazed if this still went ahead, not that I'm blaming M, as some of these a very old products to still be supporting in many respects.

I'm guessing Meridian actually thought about the CPU requirements before announcing it was coming within months?

I'm kind of curious about that. I would have thought that software rendering of MQA on an iDevice would be a highly desirable thing, but there are even worse thermal and power constraints than with (say) an MC200, even if the mobile processors are actually pretty capable these days.

So there seem to be a couple of lines of thought ... one is that the processor load we're seeing in the Tidal client is primarily a result of inefficient unpacking of the MQA file in order to get the first release of software out the door, and once developers have some time to optimise the code then things will improve. In this scenario, we'd expect to see the Tidal processor utilisation decline as new versions of the client are released, which would bode well for getting full MQA goodness on mobile devices.

The other scenario is that full MQA unpacking just consumes a fixed number of processor cycles, and there's not much to be done about that - in which case some mobile gadgets might be restricted to playing back packed files only ... which, after all, will still sound marginally better than Redbook (and vastly better than the compressed formats from other streaming services). So the jury may still be out on how much MQA we're going to get on our phones.

Yeah, but perhaps it was one of those "special conditions apply" things. There would obviously be some point at which older hardware - even with the best will in the world - would no longer have the capability to unpack MQA, any more than a 10 year old laptop will run Windows 10 effectively. If the MQA processor requirements are as high as they appear at the moment, some older Sooloos kit is highly likely to be on the deprecated list, IMHO.

Personally, I think that being able to get any kind of MQA goodness out of my 10 year old legacy DSP5200s verges on the miraculous, even if it's not the full-fat version that a nice pair of SEs would bring. :-)

Ofcourse, I would also think the Quote from HH day is in order:
"Do you think we're stupid?"

But what advantage will Roon decoding have over Tidal decoding? What is the point of Roon in a world of Tidal MQA streaming?