MQA dac ?

SaurabhK

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Any recommendations for a Dac upto 5000 dollar range which does mqa as well ? Preferrably with balanced outputs.
 
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Ps audio has some stellar dac's in this range. Including inbuilt roon bridge. So you won't need a separate streamer too.
 
There is a preowned aqua formula DAC on sale on audio note India site .
No connection with the seller.
 
This diesnt seem to have Mqa decoding it seems
I am not well versed in this area and so cannot help you with your query. But it does seem to be a DAC with very good reviews and I thought the price point was attractive if in excellent condition.
Good luck!
 
So, I did a quick reading on MQA and in my opinion, your ask is not reasonable :). Here is why I say so. MQA appears top be a software based decoding and it reaches to DA conversion chip in the same format what other formats are. So, ideally, with that kind of money, you should be looking at a very good normal DAC and hookup either a computer or Bluesound Node. On computer there are some software and services such as Tidal Desktop and Audirvana that can decode MQA. And on Bluesound Node, it can decode MQA and has digital out so, you can stream your content to Bluesound that will decode MQA and feed it to your DAC.

There may be some mainstream DACs that will come with built-in MQA decoding in future but I think, your approach may not be right from 'Spending Money Wisely' perspective.
 
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I alrrady have a bluesound node 2 . Analog out of it is quite shitty . I do have it connected using coax digital to my audiolab 8200 cdp . Sounds just abt ok. Howeever digital out of thr bsound doesnt do mqa .
 
I alrrady have a bluesound node 2 . Analog out of it is quite shitty . I do have it connected using coax digital to my audiolab 8200 cdp . Sounds just abt ok. Howeever digital out of thr bsound doesnt do mqa .
Right, looks like I will have to do some more reading. Did you check Mytek's Brooklyn DAC? It does have MQA decoding.
 
+1 on the Mytek Brooklyn DAC. Some excellent reviews on this MQA capable DAC. I have not heard one, just based on what I have read
 
 
So, I did a quick reading on MQA and in my opinion, your ask is not reasonable :). Here is why I say so. MQA appears top be a software based decoding and it reaches to DA conversion chip in the same format what other formats are. So, ideally, with that kind of money, you should be looking at a very good normal DAC and hookup either a computer or Bluesound Node. On computer there are some software and services such as Tidal Desktop and Audirvana that can decode MQA. And on Bluesound Node, it can decode MQA and has digital out so, you can stream your content to Bluesound that will decode MQA and feed it to your DAC.

There may be some mainstream DACs that will come with built-in MQA decoding in future but I think, your approach may not be right from 'Spending Money Wisely' perspective.

Please recheck. Form my study couple of months ago looking for a streamer, I remember that Tidal desktop (with software based decoding) only unfolds one of the folds of MQA (whatever that means!) and you need a MQA-enabled DAC to unfold the other two. Also, though I don’t quite trust my memory on this one, if you take digital out of Bluesound, again you’d miss out on completely unfolding the MQA. And I can say from experience that the partially unfolded MQA file like the above sounds worse than the TIDAL FLAC version for every track.

I couldn’t get to hear/demo a MQA enabled DAC, but eventually made up my mind after reading the opposing views on MQA, and using my own (unprovable) judgment that MQA must be like a very good filter/equaliser profile that’s marketed as a new hi-res format. And I went for CXN v2 which doesn’t decode MQA for the various other advantages that seemed valuable and tenable to me. But I keep an open mind to the possibility of being proven that MQA is hi-res.
 
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I have been using Tidal master for the past 1 year with a ifi nano BL, a portable mqa renderer and from what I have experienced, MQA is really something that is good to have and not something that is a must have. For this budget go for a R2R dac which imho will make a noticeable improvement in your music than just having MQA rendering ability.
 
check out pure audio lotus DAC 5. Looks good on paper and Initial reviews seem to be good and priced at $2k.
 
One of the best measuring MQA enabled DAC.
 
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