Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion MQA - Related technology, products and music Software MQA decoding vs hardware MQA decoding

One thing to keep in mind about software decoding in a PC is that it is limited by the quality of the sound card, subject to noise, power supply quality, increased jitter, etc. All of these are things that we as audiophiles have gone to great lengths to avoid. My opinion on software decoding, is that it is a bandaid at best for most. The 218 with Sooloos or Roon is still going to be the best solution. With legacy DSP speakers you are simply limited to 24/96.

Hi Bruce

Are you sure about that. In my mind the data was processed in the PC and than transmitted over the network to a network compliant device e.g. MS200. I'm happy to be wrong.

Cheers
Tom

I was just about to make the same point. I don't think those criticisms would apply.

My comment is based on using the software MQA decoding in Tidal where the PC is the player. In the instance you suggest with an MS200 all you are doing is playing the backwards compatible data from the MQA master file, not the true MQA file.

But if the decoding was to be done by a future version of Roon Server....

Then that would be a separate talking point.

nicely played!

Just an aside about the Tidal client ... when decoding MQA in software, processor utilisation on a quad-core i7 is running at about 45%. When the same client is sending passthrough MQA to the Explorer2, processor utilisation is running at about 45%.

So whatever the Tidal client is spending all those processor cycles on, it doesn't seem to be on unfolding MQA - which might indicate that MQA on mobile chips is feasible after all. I guess. Perhaps ...

What else have you got running there? Playing Killing Me Softly, the cpu usage on my clapped out work computer running an ancient Core i5 hovered around 15% and rarely above 20%. This wasn't via a USB connection however.

There's plenty of other stuff running, but the 45% utilisation is what's showing for the Tidal client alone in the iStat analysis tool. How it manages to munch this much processor when - in passthrough mode - it's basically taking bits off the ethernet and passing them through to the USB bus is beyond me ... there must be some deeply inefficient coding in the UI.

I had noticed this too, with my MacBook making a fair old busy noise with Tidal on Streamthrough.

As I posted prior to this thread the full MQA impressively outperforms software only even with, in my case, a vastly more expensive standard DAC. It would be interesting to point out the processor consumption to Tidal to see if any future update can resolve this.

Surely it must be possible given mooted mobile implementation?