Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion MQA - Related technology, products and music Rasberry Pi3 with Explorer 2 as a Roon endpoint?

Yes. 100%

Here's part of my post over at Audirvana's forum:

In interviews that MQA founder Bob Stuart gave to Computer Audiophile, The Absolute Sound and Stereophile, he said that encoded files could be "truncated" to 16-bit such that they would retain much of their benefit to a decoder over AirPlay. Two of the three reviewers for those publications actually tried 16/44 streamed files and reported that they were not as good as the 24-bit versions, but were authenticated at the DAC and sounded generally better than CD.

Obviously, the Red Book MQA CDs that are starting to appear would work with bit-perfect AirPlay. But I don't own any yet.

My question for A+ is whether or not this truncating process is possible within the program? In the meantime, I will attempt to identify the small number of 16/44 Master recordings available from TIDAL and play them to see what happens.

Now the answer from the A+ forum: While Bob Stuart seems able to deliver viable 16-bit files for decoded playback, others cannot. Damien (the developer) flatly states that MQA "can't be streamed without being truncated (and losing the useful MQA data) over Airplay".

Go figure.

Damien's assertion contradicts Bob Stuart's claim at Munich that a 16-bit option is built into each MQA file to allow use with AirPlay and Bluesound:

I don't think that Bob was claiming for a moment that you could stream over AirPlay and still decode. He was just saying that the top 16 bits would still play and play well.

You're right. I watched it again, and agree that he probably means "playable" over AirPlay, not decoded. I wanted to believe because there have been 16-bit files prepared for MQA unfolding and heard by reviewers -which he has talked about in past interviews as he did during these 40 minutes in Munich.

-Now I know that you can fully decode [16 bit MQA] over AirPlay because I'm doing just that with the CDs I bought from Chesky Records last weekend at the Denver audio show. There is such a thing as RedBook MQA after all.