It is very difficult to tell the difference between "pseudo MQA decoding" by Auralic and real MQA decoding within a top flight MQA enabled DAC. The Auralic decoded signal shows "PCM 352" on the screen rather than "MQA 352" for material recorded at this level - the Auralic pseudo decoding upsamples the undecoded MQA signal to exactly the same level as it was originally MQA encoded.
I guess Roon will offer the first level unfold under licence and then leave further upsampling or unfolding to the user.
The Auralic decoded signal shows "PCM 352" on the screen rather than "MQA 352" for material recorded at this level - the Auralic pseudo decoding upsamples the undecoded MQA signal to exactly the same level as it was originally MQA encoded.
Do you recall exactly what Tracks / Albums resulted in the PCM 352 display??
And were there other MQA Tracks displayed at PCM 96 / 192k?
Yes, all the familar Norwegian stuff on TIDAL which is at 352 eg the Fossheim Beethoven, Consortium Vocale, Vivaldi Cantatas etc shows PCM 352. The Sean Rowe New Lore is at 96 and displays PCM 96.
Streaming: Roon, NUC, QNAP869 NAS 2ch system: dCS Vivaldi, Audionet Stern, Audionet Heisenberg, Magico Q1 Retro system: 101/104/105, Red Rose Spirit
Thank you for your testing and your thoughts. If Auralic can get this to close the official MQA version in sound quality then surely other manufacturers will be doing the same and that could be a problem for MQA licensing in DAC hardware going forward.
Am I the only one to notice that the record companies are not shouting about MQA quality sound reproduction, I feel they are more interested in the smaller file sizes and reduced costs for streaming as are the streaming companies.
Yes... it must be just you not noticing. There have been several video posts by music engineers, producers etc. that have spoken of the SQ with MQA. Take the recent Chesky info as an example.
I know you have chosen a different path now with the sale of your 8kSE and 818v3 but it is shame you never really gave MQA a spin. The 2L Norwegian titles (mentioned above) don't really do anything for me as I don't recognise nor particularly like the music. IIRC it was the same for you too.
I have tried 1000+ MQA albums here and think that the SQ is excellent in the vast majority if f cases.
Seems to me that the Aurelic delevelopments might have somehow triggered another subtle wave of anti-MQAness.
The file still needs to be decoded. It's just not the MQA decoder in action, it may be the FLAC decoder. It won't be giving you full MQA be it it will still be decoding. i.e. Auralic can say that they are decoding an MQA file without infringing copyright.
I don't think technically there is such a thing as an MQA file. It's an MQA stream probably inside another container such as FLAC file.
Decoding an 'MQA FLAC file' will give an MQA stream, which is compatible with PCM stream. The issue is decoding the MQA stream - I suspect they are not, just treating it as PCM, upsampling and filtering to get for most, close to MQA quality.
Meridian owner since 1992 Prime & PSU, Focal Elear headphones, Roon (ROCK 8Gi5 NUC), Explorer 1 & 2, F80. 200/203, various Sonos (via Roon).
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MQA as you say never really did it for me, time for a change. 
