Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Thread Like Summary - MQA quality lights via 210/218

I have a Meridian 210/218 combo working perfectly for my DSP’s but have a question about the MQA lights.
The 210 shows Blue for MQA studio and green for MQA, but the 218 pre amp only ever shows green now.
MQA and the sample rate clearly displays on the master speaker.

When I was using the 218 alone with Roon the Blue light would show for MQA Studio.

My question is, is this normal or have I missed something?

Assuming your configuration is Roon --> 210 --> 218 --> DSP5200SE and all are on the latest firmware version then I think this is normal.

It’s not right though.

On your DSP5200SE display you’ll also find that the all important “.” between MQA and the data rate is missing when playing MQA Studio material.

It looks like the 218 SpeakerLink input doesn’t handle MQA material correctly, even though its network input does.

A new firmware release might fix it. With earlier versions of 218 firmware, the MQA light wouldn’t illuminate whatever type of MQA material the 210 fed to it.

On re-reading my earlier post I may have given you false hope that a firmware update exists to fix this problem. Not so I’m afraid.

I think you already have the latest firmware on your 218 (a little confusingly, the latest firmware for the 218 is build 218 which is loaded via the Meridian Device Manager – see post #291545).

This isn’t really about which lights do or do not illuminate. This is about the integrity of the MQA stream. To be quite explicit, the 218 does not support MQA properly through its SpeakerLink input. This is something only Meridian can fix.